The presence of the U.S. in the Himalayas is not a new story. American involvement in Himalayan geopolitics has a long track record, full of double games, starting as early as the 19^th Century.

After some time of direct trade between the nascent USA and the old Chinese Empire, the First Opium War in 1842 allowed the British to impose the Treaty of Nanking on the Chinese, forcing them to open their ports to foreign trade. Although at the time the U.S. was still a much smaller country, the Americans felt threatened in their strategic hegemonic goals in the Asian region. In 1844, the first diplomatic relations between the Qing Empire and the U.S. began in the context of the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Wangxia. The Americans succeeded in their goal to place their trade on par with the British, adding a right of extraterritoriality.

In 1856, the American navy clashed with Manchu imperial soldiers during the Battle of the Barrier Forts, on the sidelines of the Second Opium War unleashed by the British and French. It was in this context that the first diplomatic occasion to intervene in Tibet would occur. When the American Civil War started in 1861, the first American in history who would meet a Dalai Lama was 13 years old. His name was William Woodville Rockhill. To escape the war, his widowed mother took him to France where he was educated and served for some years in the French Foreign Regiment. Fascinated by Tibet having read Abbé Huc’s account of Lhasa, he decided to learn Tibetan, Sanskrit and Mandarin. In 1884 he managed to go to China as an unpaid secretary of the American Legation in Beijing and travelled extensively in China and Eastern Tibet, although he was not allowed to reach Lhasa. Nevertheless, his reputation as the American minister in Beijing was good enough to reach the 13^th Dalai Lama in person, in exile since 1904, escaping the British expedition of Younghusband. They met near Mount Wutai Shan in 1908. Rockhill convinced the 13^th Dalai Lama to return to Lhasa as the British and Chinese had requested.

In the same period, a few Northern American missionaries were present in Eastern Tibet but none of them could reach Lhasa. Among them the most famous were the Canadian doctor Susanna Carson Rijnhart, who lost her husband and infant child after an attack of brigands during their attempted trip to Lhasa in 1898, and Dr. Albert Leroy Shelton who was also killed by brigands in Kham. In their view, although Tibetans were obviously free to manage their internal affairs, there was no doubt that they were living under the suzerainty of the Manchus.

The interest of the U.S. as a growing international power competing with the large British and French colonial Empires, was always to secure its relations with China, if necessary at the expense of Tibetan freedom. It is no coincidence that the famous future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was appointed secretary to the Chinese imperial delegation to the Hague Convention of 1907, although he did not speak a word of Chinese and was merely a 19-year-old law student. It was his grandfather John Watson Foster who got him the job. As a retired U.S. Secretary of State, the latter became a private legal consultant and commissioner for his prestigious client, the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, at the Hague Convention. The young Foster learnt a lot from his grandfather’s old school approach to diplomacy and acquaintance with traditional Chinese power. This experience certainly shaped his view of policy concerning Tibet and even India, with a preference for the (non-communist) Chinese side.

Since 1917 India and the U.S. had been allies in two world wars and shared a distaste for European colonialism, at least in public statements from the U.S. side. The friendship continued when President F. D. Roosevelt emphasized American support for self-determination in 1940 and pushed for Indian independence. Louis Johnson, the American representative in New Delhi during World War II, openly took the side of the Indian nationalists against the view of the British. Roosevelt did not mince his words with Churchill: “I can’t believe,” he said, “that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.” In their aim to supplant the British Empire, the Americans went as far as establishing military bases in British India.

In 1941 the U.S. decided to support the Republic of China under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in its war with Japan in Manchuria, Eastern China and also Burma. When President Roosevelt announced the defence of China to be vital to the security of the U.S., American forces entered the China Burma India Theatre (CBI), providing supplies and logistics, from Indian territory. Japan had cut off Allied supplies to China via Burma and so China had to be supplied by flying over the Burmese Himalayas (“The Hump”) from India. It is a little-known fact that the U.S. established military bases in both China and India, building numerous “air bridges” to deliver weapons from India to Chinese forces. At the expense of the British, the U.S. even trained and equipped on Indian soil Chinese troops retreating from Burma. The U.S. also captured territory in Burma, building a road from Assam to Yunnan.

As the “Hump” proved not to be fully sufficient to deliver enough weapons to the Chinese, the U.S. explored an alternative land route through Sikkim as a supplement to the flights over the Hump. It was in this context that the first official American mission to Tibet was set up by Roosevelt, to ascertain the viability of such a route. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) representatives were received in Lhasa in December 1942 and brought a Patek Philippe watch as a gift from FDR to the 7-year old 13^th Dalai Lama. The Tibetans asked for and received three fully equipped, long-range radio transmitters, but either they did not know how to use them or the generators could not function at the high Tibetan altitude. Nonetheless, in this way the Americans became perfectly familiar with the region. In 1947 a “Tibetan Trade Mission” headed by Tsepon Shakabpa travelled to India, Britain, the U.S., China, and several other countries, but the mission resulted in nothing for the Tibetans.

In 1950 the U.S. came to the aid of South Korea against North Korea which was supported by China and the Soviet Union. The U.S. was upset with Indian Prime Minister Nehru’s decision to lead the Non-Alignment Movement. By the mid-1950s, India had created a cordial relationship with Russia which developed into a stronger strategic alliance. Such pro-communist attraction was not new for Nehru. American congressmen remembered well that he had been a leader at the 1927 International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in Brussels. There, Nehru, already a leader of the Indian National Congress Party, had rubbed shoulders with European Communists, trade unionists, nationalists from Asia, Africa and Latin America, and secret service agents.

But in fact, Nehru’s rapprochement with the USSR was motivated firstly by the decision of the U.S. to deliver weapons to Pakistan in 1953. This alliance was conceived as early as 1949, as expressed in a study of American interests in South Asia for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This noted Pakistan as the largest Muslim nation in the world with the best army. It also indicated that the Karachi-Lahore area of Pakistan might be required as a base for air operations against the USSR and as a staging area for forces engaged in the defence or recapture of Middle East oil areas. The more the U.S. helped Pakistan, the more Nehru befriended the Soviets and the Chinese. It came to the point that VP Richard Nixon, who visited India in 1953, declared that “the time has come to put an end to Washington’s patience with Nehru. The U.S. should take a firmer course with Nehru who has often embarrassed the U.S.”

In 1954 Nehru invited Zhou Enlai to New Delhi for talks. India and China agreed to respect each other’s sovereign territory (including Tibet), to coexist peacefully, to keep out of each other’s internal affairs, to denounce aggression, and to act for mutual benefit. Behind this wonderful romance, Nehru did not anticipate that he would soon have thousands of Chinese troops at his border, transported by the highway already built from central China to Tibet, that within weeks his borders would be encroached, and within a few years (1962) his country invaded. And above all else, that he was oblivious to the fact that all sources of water flowing into India would pass under China’s control, for free…

Nehru’s declaration in 1949 showed his level of blindness regarding the new situation: “Whatever may be the ultimate fate of Tibet in relation to China,” he said, “I think there is practically no chance of any military danger to India arising from any change in Tibet. Geographically, this is very difficult and practically it would be a foolish adventure. If India is to be influenced or an attempt made to bring pressure on her, Tibet is not the route for it. I do not think there is any necessity for our defence ministry, or any part of it, to consider possible military repercussion on the India-Tibetan frontier. The event is remote and may not arise at all.”

When the PRC encroached into Tibet in the 1950s, the U.S. did nothing. This can be understood from two points of view, which are not contradictory. On one hand, the Americans were so occupied with the Korean War and the beginning of the Cold War in Europe, that they could not devote much attention. On the other hand, with John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, his brother Allen Dulles as the director of the CIA and the pro-Chinese Richard Nixon as VP, the space favourable to India within the Eisenhower administration was thin.

On the military side, key officers who had fought alongside China in WWII wished to weaken Russia and punish India. In order to separate China from Russia’s sphere of influence, China had to be strengthened. The Chinese annexation of Tibet was therefore more in line with U.S. interests than a too-direct Russian influence on India and non-aligned countries led by Nehru. A lesser-known but surprising fact is that, long before the Nixon/Kissenger accommodation with the PRC, key actors within the U.S. State Department and high-ranking military were actually helping Mao against Chiang Kai-shek, bearing in mind their wish to counterbalance the power of Russia. The only reason the U.S. would help the Tibetans was to use them as a propaganda tool to tarnish the image of the Chinese communist regime.

Recognising Tibet’s value as bulwark against China, the CIA partly initiated a Tibetan program in 1956, based on U.S. Government commitments made to officially adopt the position that the Dalai Lama is the “head of an autonomous Tibet”. This consisted of political action, propaganda, paramilitary and intelligence operations, including covert support to Tibetan resistance a year before the 1959 uprising. After the Dalai Lama and his administration fled to India, for much of the 1960s the CIA funded the Tibetan exile movement for operations against China, and promoted Tibetan Buddhism as a soft power tool abroad. The CIA recruited an estimated 240 exile Tibetans and in the mid-1960s trained them in Colorado in the use of automatic weapons, reconnaissance, sabotage, guerrilla tactics, and espionage. This “Tibet Task Force” ran until 1974 and yielded key intelligence on China. The CIA’s strategy progressed from parachuting intelligence agents into Tibet to strengthening the Chusi Gangdruk paramilitary force of approximately 2,000 fighters at bases such as Mustang in Nepal. However in 1974, the Nepalese government cracked down on these groups, under pressure from Beijing.

Of course, U.S. military aid to the resistance fighters was so minuscule in scale that only in the benevolent and naive minds of the Tibetans was there any hope of success against China. Perhaps they did not appreciate the cynicism of the code names chosen for their operations by the Americans: “ST CIRCUS, ST BARNUM and ST BAILEY”, referencing the famous American travelling circus. As the Dalai Lama recognised much later, the assistance “…was primarily aimed at serving American interests rather than helping the Tibetans in any lasting way.”

In the meantime, just before handing over power to John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower changed his mind towards India. He understood that it was in the U.S. national interest that the genuine independence of India be strengthened, and that a moderate, non-Communist government succeed in consolidating the allegiance of the Indian people. In the longer run, the risks to U.S. security from a weak and vulnerable India would be greater than the risks of a stable and influential India. The U.S. decided to support the continuation in power of non-Communist elements and those oriented to the free world.

When Kennedy arrived at the White House, he was also full of good intentions towards India, although fully committed also to expel the Soviets from any influence in India. But something happened in December 1961 which enraged him: the annexation of Goa by India. This unsolved presence of a European colony after the departure of the British and the French, was a huge pressure for Nehru. When Portuguese soldiers fired at villagers in Goa in December 1961, it was the spark that ignited the fire. Although advised by Kennedy, as well as by British PM Macmillan and the UN Secretary General not to enter military action, Nehru decided to attack, which led to the unconditional surrender of the Portuguese governor. The U.S. asked for the immediate withdrawal of Indian forces from Goa. Expressing his strong displeasure, Kennedy told the Indian ambassador to the U.S., “You spend the last fifteen years preaching morality to us, and then you go ahead and act the way any normal country would behave… People are saying, the preacher has been caught coming out of the brothel.” Meanwhile, the future leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who was touring India at the time of the battle, made several speeches applauding the Indian action. The USSR had earlier vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning the invasion of Goa.

A few months later, China invaded India from the Tibetan Plateau. How this is related to the discontent of Kennedy? China was very anxious that the U.S. would give the green light to Chiang Kai-shek to reconquer the mainland. The U.S. and China had regular diplomatic talks In Geneva and Warsaw. Declassified State Department documents (2004) confirm earlier leaks that during one of those meeting of Sino-U.S. ambassadors in Warsaw in June 1962, U.S. ambassador John Cabot assured Chinese ambassador Wang Bingnan that there would be no attack on China’s east coast from Taiwan. Promptly, China withdrew 500,000 troops from its east coast to Tibet, and three months later the 1962 Sino-Indian war started.

On 20 October 1962, China launched a massive offensive at several points along the North East Frontier Agency border (now Arunachal Pradesh) and the region of Kashmir. The offensive caught the Indians totally by surprise, inflicting a series of defeats. India was reeling and her only solution was to call on the U.S. for help, which Nehru was forced to do very reluctantly. After a month, Nehru sent several letters to Kennedy begging for urgent rescue. Kennedy accepted, alerting U.S. Air Force squadrons in the Philippines and ordering C-130 Hercules aircraft to carry out drops of arms and ammunition supplies as well as essential clothing to Indian soldiers on the battlefront. American aircraft also carried out photo missions over the Indo-Tibet border, which were of great value since India had no maps of the areas of conflict. Then U.S. assistant secretary of state Roger Hilsman personally coordinated the aid effort. He knew the location perfectly having been an OSS Intelligence officer during the Burma campaign in World War II. Through contacts in Warsaw, the U.S. conveyed its resolve to the Chinese to come to India’s assistance. China quickly declared a unilateral cease-fire on 21 November 1962 and announced their withdrawal from the captured territory.

It would not be until the late 1980s that Tibet would once again became useful to the U.S., this time as a tool of soft power. The Dalai Lama’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, awarded for his compromise solution seeking autonomy – not independence – for Tibet, was concomitant with the Tiananmen Square protests and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. From 2002 the “Tibet question” was reinstated by the U.S as crucial factor in its strategic relationship with China.

A significant geopolitical shift came with the Obama administration. Although joint military drills between the U.S. and India had taken place as early as 2002, the U.S. ramped up its strategic interest in India during Obama’s second term with the idea to ply India from Russia’a sphere of influence. A turning point came in 2014 with the election of Narendra Modi, who wished to work more closely with the Americans. Joint exercises between the U.S. and Indian armies dubbed “Yudh Abhyas” (Hindi for ‘war preparation’) took place for the first time in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand, but this did not change the continued strategic partnership between the U.S. and India’s main rival, Pakistan. With the arrival of Donald Trump, greater pressure has been placed on Pakistan while the U.S. relationship with India has amplified, underlining the two countries’ common interest to counterbalance the rising economic and military might of China.

Initially, the Chinese government found itself unequipped to rival the soft power leveraged by the U.S. in its relationship with the exiled Tibetans, and so began long-term counter-measures. From 2007 when Hu Jintao expressed his commitment to Chinese soft power in his speech to the CCP Congress, within a relatively short space of time significant results have been achieved. In particular, the gradual process of merging the Tibetan religion into the Han Chinese system (facilitated through massive financial influxes by China into overseas Tibetan communities), has shifted the hopeful gaze of ever-increasing numbers of Tibetans towards China. It has become harder for them to resist China by supporting the retired Dalai Lama and a Tibetan movement led by an obscure Harvard graduate. While the Obama administration was more openly favourable towards Chinese interests, the Trump administration has not reactivated the Tibetan cause as soft power. The former State Department post of Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues has not been filled, and the U.S. foreign aid budget for exiled Tibetans has been slashed, leaving great uncertainty over the future of the movement. Furthermore, by allowing the China-friendly Tibetan religious leader Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje to settle for some time in America, the U.S. government has relieved India for the time being of the burden of managing a seed of Chinese influence over populations in its sensitive border regions.