The stand-off between India and China soldiers in the Dokalam area could be part of China’s “salami-slicing” tactics of making “inch-by-inch” changes to the status quo to slowly gain a strategic mile, a top American expert has said.
China and India have been engaged in a standoff in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector near the Bhutan tri-junction for over three weeks after a Chinese Army’s construction party attempted to build a road.
“I am concerned about the standoff on the border, as obviously are so many in India,” Alyssa Ayres, said a former State Department official under the Obama administration.
Currently a senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ayres said this forms a part of the larger Chinese tactics as seen in the disputed South China Sea.
She said this was a new example of China looking to take “a tactical inch over and over again to slowly gain a strategic mile”.