London’s Council for Geostrategy issued a policy paper earlier this month elaborating a “geopolitical strategy for the Himalayas” which it is pressing His Majesty’s government to adopt, to accompany the British Empire’s maritime Indo-Pacific “tilt.” It is the “rise of the People’s Republic of China” which “demands U.K. attention.”
The Council, a well-connected neocon thinktank with the requisite number of lords and ladies associated with it to attract high-level government officials regularly to its events, is unabashedly imperialist in its outlook. It describes the Himalayan region as “the northern frontier of the Indo-Pacific,” writing that “just as Chinese power expands around the Indo-Pacific rimlands, it has also pushed down through the world’s highest mountain range.… Britain may no longer be the Himalayan powerbroker it was during the age of empire, but it has residual interests in the region…. As His Majesty’s government seeks to turn that [Indo-Pacific] tilt into a lasting reality, it ought to widen its Indo-Pacific focus to incorporate the geopolitics of the Himalayas.”
After all, as the opening line of its introduction reminds: Prime Minister Harold Wilson declared in June 1965: “Britain’s frontiers are on the Himalayas.”
The report calls for intensified British deployments into the affairs of Bhutan, Nepal, and Tibet (which is, after all, part of China), the India-China border conflict, and management of the Himalayan river system which can often be a source of conflict. Britain has many assets still embedded in the region from earlier days which it can activate (e.g. military facilities in Nepal ostensibly kept as a base to recruit and train personnel for its Brigade of Gurkhas).
