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THE CHANGING POLITICAL-MILITARY ENVIRONMENT: SOUTH ASIA The security environment in South Asia has remained relatively un-settled since the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of May 1998. The Indian government’s efforts to publicly emphasize the challenges China posed in the weeks leading up to those tests—after more than a decade of mostly sotto voce complaints—served to rupture the or-dinarily glacial process of normalizing Sino-Indian relations. This process always possessed a certain fragility in that the gradually de-creasing tensions along the Sino-Indian border did not automatically translate into increased trust between Beijing and New Delhi. Even as both sides sought to derive tactical advantages from the confi-dence- building measures they had negotiated since 1993—for ex-ample, the drawdown of forces along the utterly inhospitable LAC in the Himalayas—each ended up pursuing larger grand strategies that effectively undercut the other’s interests. Beijing, for example, per-sisted in covertly assisting the nuclear and missile programs of India’s local competitor, Pakistan, while New Delhi sought in re-sponse to develop an intermediate-range ballistic missile whose comparative utility lay primarily in targeting China. The repeated identification of China as a threat to Indian interests by both Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders and other influential Indian elites in the first half of 1998 not only underscored the fragile nature of the Sino-Indian rapprochement but also ruptured the carefully maintained faà §ade of improving relations between the two coun-204 The United States and Asia tries.1 When this public finger pointing ultimately gave way to India’s resumption of nuclear testing on May 11, 1998 (an event ac-companied by the Indian prime minister’s explicit claim that those tests were driven by the hostile actions of India’s northern neighbor over the years), security competition in South Asia—which usually appears, at least in popular perceptions, as merely a bilateral affair between India and Pakistan—finally revealed itself as the â€Å"regional strategic triangle†2 it has always been. This appendix analyzes Indian and Pakistani attitudes toward China in the context of the triangular security competition in South Asia. Taking the 1998 nuclear tests as its point of departure, it assesses how China figures in the grand strategies of the two principal states in the Indian subcontinent and identifies the principal regional geopolitical contingencies for which the United States should pre-pare over the next decade. Finally, it briefly analyzes the kinds of opportunities the region offers to the USAF as it engages, even as it prepares to hedge against, a rising China. NUCLEAR TESTING AND THE TRIANGULAR SECURITY COMPETITION IN SOUTH ASIA Impact of the Nuclear Tests on Sino-Indian Relations Although Pakistan was directly affected by the Indian nuclear tests, these tests engaged Chinese security interests as well. To begin with, India’s decision to resume testing made manifest New Delhi’s re-sentment