The biannual national defense white paper of China, which was released by the Beijing government on March 31, states three major goals for the Chinese military in the coming years.

These goals are, namely, to alleviate international community fears of a militarily assertive China, to present Beijing’s vision of its future military plans through a “transparent,” non-hostile tone, and to explain the rationale for the continued increase of its defense budget over the past several years.

Despite the best Chinese attempts to pacify growing concerns in the Asia-Pacific region, there is nothing in the white paper that addresses anxious international speculation about China’s steadily increasing military spending and its acquisition of high tech weapons systems, such as the launching of its first aircraft carrier. This growing assertiveness has neighboring nations and traditional power players such as the United States increasingly apprehensive and even skeptical about China’s actual military intentions.

To be sure, China has come a long way from a time when it was more or less a passive observer in geopolitical affairs. Today it has risen to become a dominant player in the region’s economic and strategic institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the East Asia Summit and others.

That China has started taking its regional role more seriously became clear last year when the Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi warned “small countries dependent on China for their prosperity” not to expect equality with “large countries” (i.e., China) while solving maritime boundary disputes. This constituted a clear warning on the part of China to ASEAN countries that they would be well-advised not to raise further international maritime disputes in the future.

Lately Beijing’s inclusion of the South China Sea as an area of “core national interest” where issues of sovereignty are not on the table, and thus non-negotiable, has altered the very basic framework of international relations through which relations were conducted until very recently in this part of the world.

With other traditional powers, especially Japan and the U.S., no longer in a favorable position to effectively challenge China’s assertiveness, and with Beijing claiming the whole of the South China Sea as its area of influence, the strategic balance of power has been shifting in China’s favor for quite some time.

Meanwhile, Washington has been “meekly” asking Beijing to “honor international laws and rules for sharing ocean resources” in the region. Yet many countries clearly convinced that America is no longer in an effective position to protect its own national interests in this part of the world, have already started toeing the China line.

The way that Japan, which was unable to garner U.S. support in the wake of the arrest of a Chinese trawler by the Japanese Coast Guard, was forced to release the Chinese captain in a matter of a few days highlighted the new emerging power reality in the region. The Chinese threat to stop supplying “rare earth elements,” of which it holds most of the world’s deposits, and the forceful nature by which it compelled Japan to comply, showed how fundamentally the economic dynamics have changed in East Asia.

That America’s former position of dominance was increasing becoming untenable became clear from the fact that last year, despite China abruptly canceling its defense exchanges over the issue of America’s supplying of defense equipment to Taiwan, the U.S. has now had to lift its 20-year-old ban of supplying military equipment to China and has now agreed to sell C130 military cargo aircraft.

With the U.S. in retreat and Japan in decline after years of economic stagnation, India was expected to play a more active role in keeping the strategic balance in the Asian region. At the end of the Cold War, when the old power structure and institutions were being replaced with new ones, India had an excellent opportunity to increase its geopolitical influence.

But that opportunity seems to have been lost with the poorly informed policy decisions by policymakers in Delhi. India’s “Look East” policy, which was started with great earnest, has lost steam midway and has failed to look beyond economic engagement.

With the Indian diplomatic infrastructure in the region increasingly in dysfunctional ruins, Indian policymakers apparently have no inkling of what is happening on the ground in this part of the world. India has been completely excluded from the debate which has been taking place here for a new economic and strategic regional order.

With China becoming more proactive and on a spree of building new embassies and renovating old ones, and with Indian diplomatic structure in the region on the verge of collapse and allowing very little space for Indian scholars working in the field to give their input in policymaking, it may be said that there is simply no way India can get it right when it comes to this part of the world.

That there was something seriously wrong with its efforts to integrate with East Asia came to the fore when it was not even invited to a major international conference organized in Korea, in which all “important players” from the region were otherwise represented. Indian efforts to be part of the East Asia Summit seem not to be working on the ground.

Despite the India-Korea signing of a strategic partnership last year during President Lee Myung-bak’s visit, India has failed to take any concerted steps to pursue that alliance further. Not many Koreans seem to even know that India and Korea are strategic partners.

Despite all the talk of closer relations between the two countries, Korea still does not regard India as a major stakeholder in East Asia, keeping it on the periphery of strategic debate on the issue of a new emerging order currently taking place here and elsewhere in the area.

In spite of all the hype over recent free trade and strategic partnership agreements, not much progress is being made to strengthen India’s relations with either Korea or East Asia in general.

India’s inability to understand the strategic significance of Korea and the strategic future roles it will be playing may indeed prove very fatal for India in the decades to come. Until something is done to reverse this situation, Indian interests in Korea and the wider East Asian realm will continue to suffer. Indian policymakers in Delhi stand warned.

* The writer is senior fellow at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul