Reborn in 1970 INDIA

Chapter 431: Chapter 390: The Antarctic Cold

Chapter 390: The Antarctic Cold

September 1, 1979 — 1400 Hours to 2130 Hours EDT

The White House Situation Room • The Oval Office, Washington, D.C.

On the television monitor recessed into the wood-panelled wall of the White House Situation Room, two men in dark suits were shouting at each other in Manhattan.

With the volume turned down to a low murmur, the live CBS feed from the United Nations Security Council chamber showed Soviet Ambassador Oleg Troyanovsky stabbing a blunt forefinger toward the Indian seat, his face mottled crimson under the television lights as he denounced the “bourgeois-imperialist annexation of the Tarim Basin.” Three seats away, India’s Permanent Representative, Rikhi Jaipal, sat with his chin tilted upward in patrician disdain, waiting to deliver his third point-of-order rebuttal condemning the “Tsarist military subjugation of Dzungaria.”

Around the long mahogany table in the basement of the West Wing, nobody was watching the television screen.

Every pair of eyes at the table was fixed on two high-gloss, twenty-by-twenty-four-inch black-and-white reconnaissance prints lying side by side in the dead centre of the wood.

They had been taken four hours earlier—at 1715 hours local Xinjiang time—by a KH-11 Kennan electro-optical reconnaissance satellite passing two hundred and sixty miles above the northeastern rim of the Lop Desert, transmitted in real time via relay satellite to the National Photographic Interpretation Center at the Washington Navy Yard, and rushed across the Anacostia River by courier with the chemical fixer still damp on the borders.

Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, stood at the head of the table with a silver telescopic pointer in his hand.

“Look at Print One, Mr. President,” Admiral Turner said, his voice dry, clipped, and devoid of theatrical inflection. “This is the main four-thousand-metre concrete runway at Malan—Base 21, China’s strategic nuclear weapons storage and test command complex on the edge of Lop Nor, photographed at five-fifteen this afternoon local time.”

President Jimmy Carter leaned forward over the table, holding a jeweller’s magnifying loupe six inches above the glossy photographic paper. Beside him, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Secretary of Defense Dr. Harold Brown, Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General David C. Jones craned their necks over the print.

On the sun-baked concrete apron of the Malan runway sat eight giant four-engine military transport aircraft, parked wingtip-to-wingtip in two neat, parallel rows with their rear cargo ramps lowered.

Four of the aircraft bore the red star of Soviet Military Transport Aviation—Ilyushin Il-76 heavy airlifters from the Fergana division.

The other four aircraft—parked less than forty yards away on the exact same tarmac—were swept-wing, T-tailed C-90 Titan [Airavat-II] strategic airlifters bearing the three-ring roundel of the Indian Air Force.

And in Print Two, magnified to a ground resolution of four inches, showing the wide gravel plaza outside the northern blast portal of Tunnel Complex 414 three miles south of the runway, a column of heavy pneumatic transport dollies was being wheeled out of the mountain into the afternoon sun. Surrounding the dollies in a tight, disciplined inner perimeter stood men in matte-black full-shell ballistic helmets and heavy ceramic chest rigs carrying compact carbines—standing shoulder-to-shoulder, ten feet apart, with Soviet paratroopers in blue-striped undershirts and BTR-70 armoured personnel carriers. Not a single weapon was pointed between the two forces.

Jimmy Carter slowly lowered the magnifying glass and set it down on the mahogany table.

He looked up at the muted television screen on the wall—where Ambassador Troyanovsky and Ambassador Jaipal were currently shaking their fists at each other before the cameras of seventy nations—and then looked back down at the photograph of the Indian and Soviet transport planes parked wingtip-to-wingtip on the Malan runway.

“Well,” Carter said quietly, his Georgia drawl flat as a planed board. “They certainly put on a hell of a show for the networks.”

“It is Poland on the seventeenth of September, 1939,” Zbigniew Brzezinski said, leaning back in his leather chair with his fingers steepled beneath his sharp chin. There was no surprise in the National Security Advisor’s face—only the cold, clinical fascination of a chess grandmaster who had just watched his two opponents execute a pre-arranged four-move combination across the middle of the board. “A carbon-copy photocopy of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Protocol, updated for the thermonuclear age. Even down to the joint victory parade at Brest-Litovsk.”

“We have the flight logs to prove when they signed it, Mr. President,” Admiral Turner added, opening a thin blue NSA signals-intelligence folder. “Once we saw the Indian and Soviet units halt simultaneously at the exact same two-thousand-six-hundred-metre contour line in all four passes of the Tian Shan this morning without firing a single reconnaissance flare at each other, I had Fort Meade run a retroactive audit of all anomalous diplomatic aircraft movements in Central Asia over the past thirty days.

“On Saturday, August 11th, an unmarked Samudra belonging to the Indian Aviation Research Centre flew from Palam to Chkalovsky Airfield outside Moscow and stayed for eleven hours. Two days later, on Tuesday, August 14th, that same aircraft flew to Yuzhny Airfield in Tashkent—at the exact same hour Andrei Gromyko’s Ilyushin-62 and Marshal Ustinov’s command plane landed from Moscow. Both delegations stayed inside the KGB compound at the Durmen dacha in Tashkent for seventy-two hours, departing at dawn on August 17th.”

Secretary of State Cyrus Vance took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose, letting out a long, slow breath.

“They carved it up in Tashkent two weeks ago,” Vance murmured. “Every pass, every contour line, every ton of uranium at Lop Nor, and every line of the fake diplomatic protests they read into the microphones today.”

“And look at what they are doing inside Tunnel 414 right now,” Defense Secretary Harold Brown said, tapping the infrared thermal overlay of Print Two with his pen. As a former director of the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory, Brown read the physical signatures of atomic logistics like a native script.

“Those cylindrical containers on the pneumatic dollies coming out of the mountain are standard Soviet-pattern birdcage transport casks for levitated fissile pits,” Brown said grimly. “Before the Chinese civil war severed the Gansu rail corridor in 1977, the PLA’s Second Artillery evacuated the bulk of its enriched Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 stockpile from Lanzhou and Jiuquan into the deep granite tunnels at Malan. And look at the engineering trucks parked around the vertical test shafts out on the Lop Nor salt pan—that is four hundred tons of high-explosive slurry being pumped down the boreholes.

“They aren’t fighting over Base 21, Mr. President,” Brown said. “They have a team of physicists underground splitting the Chinese fissile stockpile fifty-fifty on a laboratory scale, and when the last plane takes off, they are going to blow China’s western nuclear test site off the map.”

Silence settled over the Situation Room.

Outside in the corridors of the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom, mid-level desk officers who did not have KH-11 satellite access were still writing frantic memos warning that an Indo-Soviet war might break out in the passes of the Tian Shan before midnight. Inside this room, the six men who ran the United States Government stared at the naked reality of what had just happened to the map of Eurasia.

In twelve hours between midnight and noon, six hundred and forty thousand square miles of Western China—a territory two and a half times the size of Texas—had been permanently erased from the Chinese state and partitioned into two heavily armed protectorates: a Soviet socialist satellite across the northern basin of Dzungaria, and an Indian-guaranteed “democratic republic” across the vast southern oval of the Tarim Basin.

Jimmy Carter leaned his elbows on the table, looking around the room from face to face.

“All right,” the President said, his voice low and focused. “Let us strip away the theatre in New York and look at the cold balance sheet for the United States. Nobody in this room sheds a tear for the regimes in Beijing or Shanghai—China has been a smoking ruin for three years, and having twenty-two loose nuclear warheads taken out of the hands of warlords at Lop Nor is one less nightmare for my sleep.

“What I want to know from each of you is what this partition means for us. First: did the Soviet Union just expand its empire today?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” General David Jones answered immediately from the military chair. “By occupying Dzungaria down to the northern crest of the Tian Shan range, Moscow has pushed its defensive perimeter three hundred miles southeast. They have secured the Karamay oilfields, the Dzungarian Gate, and the northern rail corridor, eliminating any future flank threat to Soviet Kazakhstan.”

“Could the United States have stopped those five Soviet divisions from marching into Northern Xinjiang this morning?” Carter asked.

General Jones and Harold Brown didn’t even need to look at each other.

“With what, Mr. President?” Harold Brown asked bluntly. “Dzungaria is two thousand miles inland from the nearest ocean, bordered by Soviet Kazakhstan on the west, Soviet-controlled Mongolia on the northeast, and the burning wasteland of China on the east. Short of launching strategic nuclear missiles from Montana, the United States had zero physical capability to stop the Red Army from crossing the Kazakh border into Ürümqi. Moscow has been planning that move since 1977. They were going to take Northern Xinjiang no matter what Washington said or did.”

“Which brings us to the second question,” Carter said, tapping the saffron-shaded southern half of the map—the five hundred thousand square miles of the Tarim Basin from Kashgar to Charklik now occupied by the Indian 14th Corps. “Is it good for the United States that the Republic of India has expanded its strategic sphere six hundred kilometres north of the Himalayas, seized a hundred and forty thousand tonnes of uranium ore to feed its 0.75 warhead ceiling, and locked up another fifty billion barrels of oil?”

“In the abstract? Hell no,” Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal said candidly. “It makes New Delhi entirely self-sufficient in nuclear fuel and adds another massive energy reserve to the Rupee bloc.”

“And in the concrete reality of September 1st, 1979?” Zbigniew Brzezinski interrupted, leaning forward across the mahogany table, his pale eyes sharp as needles. “Compare what happened this morning to the only actual alternative that existed at dawn today!

“If the Republic of India had not marched forty thousand troops and two hundred Arjuna tanks across the Kunlun passes into Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan, and Aksu at six-thirty this morning—where would the Soviet Red Army be sitting right now?”

Brzezinski stood up, walked to the wall map of Inner Asia, and swept his hand from the Kazakh border all the way down to the northern frontier of Tibet and Kashmir.

“If India had stayed behind the Himalayas,” Brzezinski said forcefully, “those five Soviet mechanized divisions would not have stopped at the Tian Shan mountains! They would have rolled straight down through the Torugart and Bedel passes into the Tarim Basin! By tonight, the Soviet Union would own Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan, all fifty billion barrels of Tarim oil, and all one hundred and forty thousand tonnes of Tarim uranium—and the Red Army would be sitting on the northern border of Tibet and thirty miles from Pakistan!

“So when you ask: Is it good that India expanded? No, we never applaud another superpower growing larger. Is it infinitely better for the United States that India took the southern half of Xinjiang rather than the Soviet Union taking the whole damn thing? Yes! A thousand times yes!”

Cyrus Vance frowned, looking from the satellite photos of the Malan runway up to Brzezinski at the map.

“Wait a minute, Zbig,” Vance said, playing devil’s advocate with the memory of their April 1978 Oval Office meeting fresh in his mind. “Sixteen months ago, when the communist coup happened in Kabul, you popped a bottle of Dom Pérignon and told the President that the Indo-Soviet alliance was dead forever because superpowers cannot tolerate each other on their borders. Yet two weeks ago in Tashkent, Gromyko and Sathe sat down in secret, clinked vodka glasses, divided Xinjiang down the middle, and raided Lop Nor together! Doesn’t this prove that Moscow and New Delhi can still cut grand strategic deals behind our backs?”

Brzezinski did not flinch. In fact, a slow, deeply cold, professorial smile spread across his angular face.

“Cy,” Brzezinski said softly, “you are confusing a funeral division of spoils with a marriage.

“Why did Stalin and Hitler sign the pact to partition Poland in August 1939? Because there was a weak, collapsing buffer space lying between them, and neither wanted the other to swallow the whole space alone! And what happened the moment they finished swallowing Poland and met along the Bug River in the middle?”

Brzezinski placed both hands flat on the wall map at the 2,600-metre contour line of the Tian Shan mountains.

“Before six-thirty this morning,” Brzezinski said, his voice ringing with absolute geopolitical conviction, “where did the Soviet Union and the Indian security sphere touch? Only at a tiny, frozen, twenty-mile mountain pinprick at the tip of the Wakhan Corridor! And even that twenty-mile pinprick caused so much violent paranoia between them over the past sixteen months that New Delhi spent the last year funnelling night-vision sights and proximity-fuzed mortars to Tajik rebels in Badakhshan to kill Soviet advisers, until Moscow was forced to demilitarize the Wakhan last week just to get India to stop!

“Now look at what Gromyko and New Delhi have done to themselves by signing this Tashkent Pact today!”

Brzezinski dragged his index finger from the Pamir Knot in the west, past the Torugart Pass, the Bedel Pass, the Muzart Pass, and the Iron Gate above Korla, all the way to Lop Nor in the east.

“They have just increased their shared military border from twenty miles to fifteen hundred miles!” Brzezinski declared.

The room went very quiet as the five other men stared at the long red line slashing across the heart of Asia.

“Think about the iron laws of history, Mr. President!” Brzezinski said, turning to Carter. “The United States will not even have to lift a finger to manufacture friction between Moscow and New Delhi over the next twenty years! Geography will manufacture it for us every single morning!

“Along fifteen hundred miles of the Tian Shan mountains, Soviet airborne regiments and motor-rifle divisions at two thousand eight hundred metres are now staring directly down their gun barrels at Indian armoured brigades and missile batteries sitting six hundred yards below them at two thousand six hundred metres!

“Every time a Kazakh herder crosses a pass; every time an Uyghur rebel in Soviet-occupied Ürümqi flees south to his cousins in Indian-protected Kashgar; every time an oil reservoir or a uranium seam at Aksu straddles the subterranean boundary line; every time an Indian Thunder-Eye radar sweeps north over Frunze or a Soviet MiG-25 strays two miles south of the ridge—the friction between Moscow and New Delhi will multiply!

“More border means more contact. More contact between two paranoid, heavily armed superpowers means more friction, more suspicion, more troop deployments, and more chaos!

“For God’s sake, gentlemen—remember 1950!” Brzezinski’s hand slapped the eastern map of China. “In 1950, Stalin and Mao Zedong signed an eternal Treaty of Friendship and Alliance! Both of them were fanatical Marxist-Leninists worshipping at the same ideological altar! And within twelve years, simply because they shared a four-thousand-mile land border in Inner Asia, they were shooting at each other on the Ussuri River and aiming nuclear missiles at each other’s capitals!

“If two Communist dictatorships couldn’t share a border in Inner Asia without becoming mortal enemies—how long do you think a stagnant, bureaucratic Soviet Communist state is going to live in harmony across a fifteen-hundred-mile mountain line with the fastest-growing, most ruthless capitalist powerhouse in the Eastern Hemisphere?!”

At the mention of the word capitalist, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal leaned forward over the mahogany table, uncapping his gold pen.

“Zbig has just put his finger on the single most important strategic truth of the last decade—one that our own newspapers and half of Capitol Hill still haven’t woken up to,” Blumenthal said, looking directly at President Carter.

“Mr. President, when American politicians talk about India in the cloakrooms on the Hill, half of them still talk as if it were the India of 1968—some Fabian-socialist Third World country lectured by economists from the London School of Economics, begging for World Bank handouts and preaching non-aligned socialism.

“That India died on the night of December 22nd, 1971.”

Blumenthal opened a thick Treasury Department macroeconomic assessment binder bound in dark blue buckram and turned to a tabbed chart titled The 1971 Indian Structural Overhaul (The National Prosperity Omnibus).

“Look at what New Delhi actually did in the week after the 1971 war ended, while the rest of the world was looking at the surrender in Dhaka,” Blumenthal said, his voice carrying the grudging awe of a former corporate chief executive examining a rival’s balance sheet.

“In a single seventy-two-hour parliamentary blitzkrieg, they tore up twenty-four years of post-independence socialist bureaucracy root and branch: “First: They repealed their Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act (MRTP). Overnight, corporate size stopped being treated as a crime and became a national weapon. They allowed their private industrial conglomerates to integrate vertically across steel, energy, shipping, semiconductors, and aerospace on a scale that would make John D. Rockefeller blush. “Second: They threw out their draconian foreign-exchange law—FERA, which treated any businessman holding a dollar as a criminal—and replaced it with FEMA, treating private capital as national capacity. “Third: They carved out massive Special Economic Zones with zero corporate tax holidays and single-window clearances that generated half a million manufacturing jobs per zone inside thirty-six months, wired together by their synchronized rail-road-and-power Gati Shakti infrastructure grid. “Fourth: They killed the Marxist trade-union strikes across India in one stroke by mandating a statutory ten-percent worker profit-sharing bonus tied directly to factory output—turning every assembly-line worker in Gorakhpur, Bombay, and Madras into a stakeholder in private corporate profits!”

Blumenthal looked around the Situation Room table.

“Do you realize what that eight-year economic explosion in India has done to the ideological war between Capitalism and Communism across the globe?” Blumenthal asked.

“Before 1972,” Blumenthal said, “whenever a newly independent country in Africa, Asia, or Latin America wanted to industrialize quickly, who did they look to as their model? They looked to Moscow or Beijing! Because they thought Western capitalism was only for rich white colonial powers, and that a poor agrarian country needed Soviet five-year plans and state nationalization to grow!

“Today? India has become the supreme symbol of modern, industrial capitalism in the developing world alongside the United States! When Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, or Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, or Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, or Biju Patnaik in Orissa looks at the world in 1979, they see the Soviet economy rusting in breadlines while China drowned in twenty million corpses of communist madness—and right next door, they see a democratic, private-enterprise India growing at ten percent a year, launching satellites, building nuclear carriers, and lending twenty billion dollars through the AADB!

“India’s capitalist triumph has pulled thirty-eight nations of Asia and Africa right out of Moscow’s ideological orbit! They have made Marxism-Leninism look like an obsolete nineteenth-century disease!”

“And what about our own sphere, Mike?” Cyrus Vance added, turning to the global map on the side screen. “Look at what the collapse of China and the rise of the AADB has produced for American diplomacy over the past twenty-four months.

“Because the smaller nations of East Asia and Southeast Asia—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia—and the major economies of South America—Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela—are terrified of being swallowed entirely by either the Soviet military bloc or the Indian Rupee monopoly, they have locked themselves tighter into the American financial, technological, and security architecture than at any time since 1945! Our trade volume across the Pacific Rim and the Western Hemisphere is up forty-two percent in two years. Our grand strategy is not failing, Mr. President; the world has simply consolidated into three giant gravitational basins.”

Jimmy Carter looked closely at Blumenthal and Brzezinski.

“Let me ask the blunt question that nobody in Washington likes to say out loud,” Carter said quietly. “Can the United States stop India from rising? Not contain them at the edges—I mean stop their trajectory toward becoming an economic and military equal to the United States by the end of this century?”

For five seconds, nobody spoke.

Then Secretary of Defense Harold Brown—a man who dealt in hard physical quantities rather than political slogans—shook his head slowly.

“No, Mr. President,” Brown said flatly. “Hell no. And any planner in the Pentagon or Langley who tells you we can is lying to you.”

Brown ticked the reasons off on his fingers:

“Look at the fundamental physics of what India possesses in 1979: “First: God-gifted geography. Unlike Europe or China or Russia, where only a fraction of the land is arable, over fifty percent of the Indian subcontinent is flat, alluvial, river-fed agricultural soil bathed in year-round sunshine. With their new irrigation grids and high-yield genetics, they can feed a billion people effortlessly and export the surplus. “Second: Demographics and Education. Seven hundred million people—nearly triple the population of the United States—with fifty million children now running through disciplined technical schools and sports academies, and engineering universities turning out two hundred thousand metallurgists, chemists, and computer scientists a year. “Third: Internal Cohesion. Ten years ago, the CIA predicted India would fracture along linguistic and regional lines—North against South, rich coastal states against poor eastern mineral states. Instead, they abolished the Freight Equalization Policy in 1976, turned Orissa and Bihar into booming steel-and-titanium corridors, allied with MGR in Tamil Nadu by pouring fifty thousand high-tech jobs and five-rupee insulin into Madras, and integrated the Northeast through Burma. Every state in India is now so economically interdependent on the others’ power grids, markets, and supply chains that secession is dead. “Fourth: With the Tarim Basin added to Bombay High, Barmer, and the Andaman Sea today, they have complete continental self-sufficiency in oil, gas, uranium, iron, titanium, and three-micron silicon.”

Brown looked Carter straight in the eye.

“You cannot stop a continental tsunami of seven hundred million people once it has mastered advanced physics and industrial capitalism, Mr. President,” the Defense Secretary said. “Trying to blockade or militarily confront India would only bankrupt the United States and destroy the global economy.”

“More than that, Mr. President,” Treasury Secretary Blumenthal chimed in, leaning forward with an unexpected, pragmatic grin, “if we are being completely honest in this room—India’s capitalist rise has inadvertently been the best thing that happened to the domestic American economy in twenty years!”

Carter blinked, surprised. “How do you figure that, Mike?”

“Think about what American industry looked like in 1973 before the Indian shock,” Blumenthal said. “Detroit was lazy, bloated, and arrogant—building gas-guzzling, rust-prone sedans that broke down at forty thousand miles while the UAW and the Big Three executives passed the bill to the American consumer. Our pharmaceutical conglomerates were sitting on old patents, charging forty dollars a bottle for basic antibiotics and insulin without investing in new biotech. IBM and our electronics firms were resting on their laurels.

“Then what happened after the Geneva Accord last year?” Blumenthal asked. “Shergill Motors opened its joint-venture plants in Ohio and Michigan to build the Shikari, employing fifty thousand American union workers and offering a fuel-efficient, indestructible car with a five-year warranty! Simultaneously, FDA-certified Indian generic medicines entered the pipeline, and Gorakhpur’s three-micron logic chips hit the market!

“Suddenly, out of sheer, mortal terror that Indian corporations would eat them alive,” Blumenthal said, slapping the table, “Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler overhauled their entire engine and quality-control lines in eighteen months! Car prices in America have stabilized for the first time in a decade! Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly slashed the domestic prices of basic therapeutics by thirty percent and tripled their R&D budgets into next-generation biotechnology!

“And notice the structural difference between India and export-dumping economies like Japan or South Korea,” Blumenthal pointed out. “Japan has a small population and zero natural resources, so it has to survive through predatory export dumping that hollows out American factories. India has seven hundred million consumers of its own—plus Africa and Central Asia! India isn’t trying to survive by dumping cheap toys in California; they are consuming eighty percent of their own industrial growth internally!

“Geographically, the United States and the Republic of India sit on exact opposite sides of the earth—twelve time zones apart. We do not covet an inch of their land; they do not covet an inch of the Western Hemisphere. And look at who their existential enemies are!”

Brzezinski nodded vigorously, picking up the thread.

“Who threatens the Republic of India over the next fifty years, Mr. President?” Brzezinski asked.

“First: Communism. Whether it is the Soviet Red Army sitting across the 2,600-metre line in the Tian Shan mountains today, or whatever ragged Maoist remnants survive in China, Communism is an existential threat to India’s borders and to the capitalist identity that underpins their entire prosperity!

“Second: Islamic Extremism and Wahhabi Fundamentalism. India has sixty-five million Muslims inside its borders, just took responsibility for five million more in Kashgar, and sits next door to the burning caldron of Iran, Afghanistan, and a collapsing, radicalized Pakistan! Militant jihadism is as lethal a threat to New Delhi as it is to Jerusalem, London, or Washington!

“This does not mean the Cold War is over,” Brzezinski said, his voice dropping to a low, crystalline quiet. “For the past twelve months, since they launched their carrier and signed the Singapore nuclear ratio, we have had to accept that we are in a three-way Cold War with both Moscow and New Delhi.

“But our Cold War with Moscow is a blood-and-iron war against a totalitarian system that wants to bury capitalism. Our Cold War with India is an Antarctic Cold War—a freezing, unsentimental competition for markets, technology standards, and spheres of influence between the world’s two largest capitalist democracies, who both want the Soviet Union contained and Islamic extremism crushed!”

President Carter leaned back in his leather chair, his hands resting on the arms. The strategic fog had cleared completely. He was an engineer; once the forces and vectors of a machine were mapped accurately, he knew exactly where to apply the lever.

“All right,” Carter said, his blue eyes turning hard and businesslike. “So we do not fight the tsunami. We ride it, we channel it against the Soviets, and we make sure the United States collects its toll at every gate.

“Look at the immediate board tonight—September 1st, 1979. We have three active theatres where India’s move into the Tarim Basin gives us immediate leverage: Central America, India’s domestic market walls, and Iran and the Tarim Basin itself.”

Carter looked at Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

“Let’s start with our own backyard: Nicaragua,” Carter said coldly.

Six weeks earlier, on July 19th, the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)—heavily armed and trained by Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet KGB—had marched into Managua, overthrown Anastasio Somoza, and begun turning Nicaragua into a Soviet-Cuban military bridgehead on the mainland of Central America, threatening El Salvador, Honduras, and the Panama Canal. Whenever Washington had floated the idea of decisive intervention at the Organization of American States or the UN Security Council, Moscow had threatened a veto and Non-Aligned diplomats had murmured about “non-interference.”

A slow, razor-sharp smile crossed Brzezinski’s face.

“Listen to the exact words Prime Minister Chavan and Chief Minister Karan Shergill used at Vigyan Bhavan four hours ago, Mr. President,” Brzezinski said, picking up the verbatim transcript of the New Delhi press conference.

“They stood in front of three hundred international journalists and declared: ‘When a provisional council of democratic citizens in a neighbouring land begs the world’s largest democracy to intervene and liberate them from dead Communism and foreign totalitarianism, how could the conscience of India possibly refuse?'”

Brzezinski laughed out loud, tossing the transcript onto the table.

“They just wrote our UN Security Council speech for Operation Central American Shield word for word!” Brzezinski said. “Tomorrow morning, when our backchannel cable goes to Foreign Minister Swaran Singh in New Delhi, Item One is Nicaragua:

“We tell New Delhi plainly: The United States will not support Moscow’s resolution against you at the UN Security Council tonight, and we will publicly validate your humanitarian defense of the ‘Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim.’ And in return, next month, when a Provisional Democratic Junta of Nicaraguan patriots in Tegucigalpa and Costa Rica formally appeals to the United States to liberate Nicaragua from Soviet-Cuban Communist tyranny—and the United States Marines and our Central American allies move in to crush the Sandinistas once and for all—the Republic of India will stand up at the UN Security Council and vote with the United States, or abstain favorably, using the exact same doctrine of ‘liberating a neighbour from Communism’ that you just used in Kashgar!”

“If they object, they expose their own Kashgar doctrine as a fraud within thirty days of proclaiming it,” Cyrus Vance noted with quiet satisfaction. “Swaran Singh won’t blink for two seconds. New Delhi doesn’t give a damn about the Sandinistas in Managua; they will trade Nicaragua for international validation of the Tarim border in a heartbeat.”

“Good. That locks down Item One,” Carter said, making a sharp note on his pad. “Now—Item Two. The Iranian Civil War and India’s Market Walls. Mike, Cy—walk me through the economic lever.”

Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal leaned forward, tapping the 1971 Indian legislative dossier.

“Mr. President, when India passed those thirty structural reform bills in December 1971, they did something very clever,” Blumenthal explained. “Internally, they abolished every socialist restriction—they repealed the MRTP monopoly cap, replaced FERA with FEMA, created tax-free Special Economic Zones, and gave workers ten percent of the profits.

“But externally—under Clause Six of that 1971 Omnibus—they erected a one-hundred-percent tariff shield on finished foreign manufactured goods, and at Geneva last year they held us to a strict forty-nine-percent foreign equity cap on American joint ventures inside India!

“Back in 1971, when Indian industry was an infant recovering from decades of license-raj stagnation, protecting their domestic market with a hundred-percent external tariff wall while they scaled up made textbook Hamiltonian sense,” Blumenthal said. “Their stated goal in 1971 was to build scale for twenty years before dropping the external tariffs.

“Well, it is 1979! They didn’t need twenty years—they did it in eight! Today, India is an industrial colossus sitting in the G8, exporting microprocessors to Germany, locomotives to Africa, and cars to Ohio, and today they just added the oil and uranium of the Tarim Basin to their balance sheet!

“If India keeps a one-hundred-percent tariff wall on finished American goods now that they are a global superpower,” Blumenthal said firmly, “it is no longer infant-industry protection; it is mercantilist hoarding that will eventually hurt both their economy and ours by breeding domestic complacency and choking off two-way capital flows!

“We need to make our fortune with India’s rise, Mr. President, not sit outside the glass looking in! The more Wall Street banks, American pension funds, Caterpillar, Boeing, General Electric, DuPont, and IBM are invested inside India and its new protectorates—and the more Indian conglomerates are invested in Ohio and Texas—the deeper the mutual dependency becomes!”

“And look at how that ties directly to the Iranian Civil War,” Cyrus Vance added, pointing at the Persian Gulf on the wall chart, where the blue symbol of INS Viraat and India’s Carrier Strike Group One sat at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.

“Right now, Iran is a powder keg,” Vance said. “In the north, the KGB is pouring weapons across the Caspian to the communist Tudeh and MEK militias. In Baghdad, our satellite imagery shows Saddam Hussein massing six armoured divisions near Basra to invade Khuzestan. And in the Gulf of Oman sits the Indian First Expeditionary Fleet with two thousand Manduk amphibious shock troops.

“In this chaos, anything could happen—Moscow could send airborne divisions into northern Iran, or India could land troops at Bandar Abbas and Abadan. We must get ahead of New Delhi before the Iranian front explodes. We make it clear to Chavan and Shergill that in Iran, just as in Xinjiang, the Soviet Union is our common enemy—and that if military stabilization or post-war reconstruction is required in Iran, the United States and India will coordinate our moves jointly and share the post-war Iranian oil and reconstruction contracts fifty-fifty, rather than racing each other in the dark!”

Carter nodded slowly. “Which brings us to Item Three—the most immediate piece on the board tonight: The Tarim Basin itself.”

Carter looked at Brzezinski and Vance, a glint of pure, shrewd Southern political calculation in his eyes.

“New Delhi went on television four hours ago and told the whole world that they have not annexed Southern Xinjiang,” Carter said softly. “They swore on a stack of Bibles that the Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim is an independent, sovereign, multiparty democracy of five million free citizens that simply asked India for a security umbrella against Soviet communism, and that its economy is open to fair international development.

“Well, gentlemen—what happens if the United States takes Prime Minister Chavan and Chief Minister Shergill literally at their word tonight?”

Around the table, Brzezinski, Vance, and Blumenthal began to smile simultaneously.

“We call their bluff by embracing it with both arms!” Brzezinski said, his eyes lighting up with wicked delight. “Think of the judo move, Mr. President!

“Moscow expects us to scream about the partition of China. New Delhi expects us to grumble and abstain at the UN while they lock up the Tarim Basin as a closed shop for the AADB and Shergill Industries.

“Instead, at nine o’clock tonight, you walk into the White House Press Briefing Room and deliver a statement that turns the entire diplomatic board upside down:

“First: The United States strongly condemns the unprovoked Soviet military invasion of Northern Xinjiang (Dzungaria) as a brutal act of communist imperialism! “Second: The United States applauds the decisive humanitarian intervention of the Republic of India in stopping the Red Army at the Tian Shan mountains and rescuing five million citizens of the Tarim Basin from totalitarian tyranny! “Third: Because the United States shares India’s sacred commitment to ensuring that this new democracy is a true, open, sovereign democracy and not a closed colonial preserve—the United States tonight extends full diplomatic recognition to the Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim! We announce that an American Ambassador and a forty-man Embassy staff will fly into Kashgar next week! We announce that the International Monetary Fund and the US Export-Import Bank are immediately offering a five-hundred-million-dollar development facility to the government in Kashgar! And we announce that a consortium of American energy and mining corporations—Exxon, Chevron, Bechtel, and Kerr-McGee—is flying to Kashgar and New Delhi on Monday to bid on technology transfers and joint-venture extraction contracts in the Tarim Basin!”

Secretary of Defense Harold Brown let out a low chuckle. “If Kashgar is truly a ‘Free and Democratic Republic’ as New Delhi just told the world press, Chavan and Swaran Singh cannot publicly slam the door in the face of an American Embassy and American corporate investment without admitting to the whole world that Pravda was right and Tarim is just an Indian colony!”

“And privately,” Brzezinski said, his voice dropping an octave, losing every trace of humor and turning as cold and sharp as a stiletto, “when Cyrus and I send the encrypted backchannel message to New Delhi tonight, we explain the physics of the alternative to Mr. Kao and Chief Minister Shergill with total, unvarnished candour.”

Brzezinski leaned both hands on the mahogany table, looking down at the relief map of the Tarim Basin—where a single vulnerable highway ring ran around three hundred thousand square miles of shifting sand dunes, bordered by the jagged, porous mountain passes of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Soviet Kirghizia, and inhabited by five million fiercely religious Uyghur, Kirghiz, and Kazakh tribesmen who had just got their hands on thousands of abandoned PLA rifles.

“India has a magnificent dream in the Tarim Basin,” Brzezinski said quietly. “They want to lay a broad-gauge electrified railway across the seventeen-thousand-foot Kunlun passes. They want to lay a six-hundred-mile oil and gas pipeline across permafrost and desert sand down to Ladakh. They want to run quiet, orderly in-situ uranium leaching mines at Yarkand and Aksu and haul the yellowcake home in mine-carts to fuel their reactors.

“To build railways, oil pipelines, and uranium leaching plants across six hundred miles of desert and mountain gorges, you need one absolute prerequisite: peace and quiet.

“If New Delhi acts like a greedy monopolist,” Brzezinski said, his eyes hard as flint, “if they try to lock the United States out of the Tarim Basin completely, keep their external tariff walls at a hundred percent, and refuse to let American oil majors and engineering firms have even a fifteen-to-twenty-percent equity slice of the Tarim development cake… well, the Central Intelligence Agency has been operating in the mountains of Central Asia for thirty years. And our Saudi allies have plenty of preachers and gold coins looking for a cause.

“It does not take an army to ruin a pipeline or derail a uranium train in a desert the size of Texas, Mr. President,” Brzezinski said softly. “A few million dollars in untraceable cash dropped into the right hands in the bazaars of Khotan and Yarkand; a few dozen shoulder-fired rockets and plastic explosives handed to fanatical mullahs who are told that ‘godless Hindu polytheists have come to steal Muslim oil and turn their mosques into temples’; a couple of ambushes on the Kunlun railway tunnels every week—and suddenly India’s four-thousand-crore treasure chest turns into a bleeding, ten-year counter-insurgency quagmire where every barrel of oil and every pound of uranium has to be guarded by a battalion of infantry!

“We do not want chaos in the Tarim Basin,” Brzezinski concluded, straightening up. “Chaos in the Tarim Basin only helps the Soviets sitting on top of the Tian Shan passes. We want India’s buffer against Moscow to be strong, rich, and stable.

“All we are asking from New Delhi is the adult rule of co-existing capitalist superpowers: Share the fortune. Lower the 1971 external tariff walls on high-end American capital goods; let American oil and engineering firms take a twenty-percent junior partner slice of the Tarim Basin consortia alongside BUM and Shergill Industries; let our Embassy open in Kashgar; and back our play against the communists in Nicaragua and Iran.

“Either we both eat at the table—even if India takes the eighty-percent lion’s share of the cake in its own backyard and we take a twenty-percent slice—or we kick the table over in the sand and nobody eats in peace.”

For a full minute after Brzezinski finished, the Situation Room was silent save for the quiet hum of the ventilation fans.

Cyrus Vance looked at Treasury Secretary Blumenthal, then at Defense Secretary Brown, and finally at President Carter.

For the first time since the traumatic winter of 1977, the American national security apparatus was neither panicked nor paralyzed. They had taken the full measure of the third superpower. They knew where India could not be stopped, they knew where India was vulnerable, and they knew precisely what Washington wanted out of the bargain.

“Cyrus,” President Carter said, rising from his chair at the head of the table, “draft the private backchannel message to Foreign Minister Swaran Singh and Prime Minister Chavan right now. Use the direct Geneva link. Put all four points in plain, respectful, unmistakable English:

“One: Publicly, at nine o’clock tonight, I will go before the cameras in the Briefing Room, condemn the Soviet military occupation of Northern Xinjiang, welcome the birth of the Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim, and praise India’s decisive action in halting Soviet expansionism at the Tian Shan mountains. “Two: As proof of our support for the new democracy, the United States is extending immediate diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Tarim, dispatching an Ambassador to open a US Embassy in Kashgar, and sending a presidential trade and financing mission—backed by the Ex-Im Bank, Exxon, Chevron, Bechtel, and Westinghouse—to New Delhi and Kashgar next week to sign for a twenty-percent American corporate participation in the Tarim petroleum, mining, and infrastructure consortia. “Three: We expect the Republic of India to open bilateral talks in October to begin the phased reduction of the December 1971 hundred-percent external tariff wall on American capital equipment, aerospace electronics, and consumer goods, and to establish a joint US–India strategic coordination committee on the Iranian Civil War so that neither Moscow nor Baghdad can seize the Persian Gulf. “Four: Next month, when the United States moves to restore democratic governance in Nicaragua and remove the Soviet-Cuban junta in Managua, we expect the Republic of India’s full diplomatic backing at the United Nations Security Council under the exact principle of democratic stabilization Prime Minister Chavan proclaimed today.”

Carter paused at the door of the Situation Room, looking back at Brzezinski and Vance.

“Do we need to spell out the threat of what happens in the bazaars of Kashgar and Khotan if they slam the door in our faces?” Carter asked quietly.

Brzezinski shook his head, a thin, knowing smile on his lips.

“To Swaran Singh, R. N. Kao, and Karan Shergill, Mr. President?” Brzezinski said. “We don’t need to write a single word of the threat on paper. The moment they read that the United States wants to open a thirty-man Embassy in Kashgar and take a twenty-percent corporate stake in the Tarim oil and uranium fields to help ‘stabilize the young democracy,’ Kao and Shergill will hear the unspoken alternative louder than a megaphone.

“They are businessmen, Mr. President. A businessman who has just found a five-hundred-billion-dollar goldmine in his backyard will happily pay a twenty-percent insurance premium to the only other syndicate in town that could burn his mine-head down—especially when paying that twenty percent locks the United States in as a co-guarantor of the Tarim border against Moscow!”

Carter nodded once.

“Send the cable to New Delhi before eight-thirty,” the President ordered, checking his wristwatch. “And have Jody Powell tell the network crews in the Briefing Room that I’ll be out at nine o’clock sharp to welcome the world’s newest democracy.”

End of Chapter 390