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Flipping China’s oldest anxiety back on Beijing

Writer: Sakshi Singh
Sakshi Singh
Jul 26
10 min read

Updated: Oct 4

PM Narendra Modi and President Prabowo Subianto look on as Indian and Indonesian officials exchange signed bilateral agreements in Jakarta.
PM Narendra Modi and President Prabowo Subianto look on as Indian and Indonesian officials exchange signed bilateral agreements in Jakarta. 

On 7 July 2026, at Istana Merdeka in Jakarta, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Prabowo Subianto stood behind a stack of 16 signed documents and did something that 8 years of talk hadn’t managed to do. They gave a real timeline to a port that has been sitting in memoranda since 2018. It was Modi’s first state visit to Indonesia since both countries upgraded ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2018. Underneath all the ceremony, was a far more consequential development unfolding, one that barely got a paragraph in most of the coverage: New Delhi and Jakarta agreed to jointly develop Sabang port, on Indonesia’s Weh Island, at the very moment, India is racing to finish a $9 billion transshipment hub roughly 100 nautical miles away at Great Nicobar. Put those two dots on a map and something clicks into place that changes how you should think about the Strait of Malacca.


What actually got signed 


The Jakarta visit produced agreements across defence, maritime security, critical minerals, digital payments, AI, agriculture and education- 16 documents in total, but three items carry disproportionate strategic weight.


Indonesia will procure India’s BrahMos Supersonic Cruise missile and Astra beyond-visual-range (BVR) air-to-air missile. BrahMos is a joint India-Russia supersonic cruise missile, among the fastest anti-ship and land-attack weapons in service anywhere, capable of being fired from land, air, sea and submarine platforms. Astra is India’s indigenously developed air-to-air missile designed to let fighter aircraft engage targets well beyond visual range. For India, this is a significant defence export breakthrough in Southeast Asia. It signals that Indian-origin weapons systems are now credible enough for G20 economy with the region's largest military to bet its own deterrence posture on them, and it embeds India inside Indonesia’s defence-industrial base in a way that’s hard to reverse.


The BrahMos supersonic cruise missile system, a key asset in Indonesia's upgraded maritime deterrence posture
The BrahMos supersonic cruise missile system, a key asset in Indonesia's upgraded maritime deterrence posture
Display model of India’s indigenously developed Astra beyond-visual-range (BVR) air-to-air missile, slated for export to Indonesia.
Display model of India’s indigenously developed Astra beyond-visual-range (BVR) air-to-air missile, slated for export to Indonesia.

Sabang


To understand why Sabang matters, one has to understand the company India is keeping in Jakarta’s foreign policy. Indonesia’s relationship with China is not adversarial, it's deeply, structurally intertwined. China is Indonesia’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade running well over $100 billion a year, and Chinese capital has bankrolled marquee projects like the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail, along with tens of billions more pledged for nickel processing and EV supply chains that Jokowi’s and now Prabowo’s governments leaned on heavily. Indonesia frames its participation in the Belt and Road Initiative as consistent with its long-standing “independent and active foreign policy”, positioning itself as keeping the BRI open rather than being absorbed by it.


This is the essential character of Indonesia’s statecraft, it doesn't choose sides, it monetises its position between them. Jakarta needs Indian capital and defence partnerships for the same reason it needs Chinese capital- because playing multiple great powers off each other, gently and without confrontation, is how a middle power keeps its autonomy. The Sabang deal is not Indonesia choosing India over China. It’s Indonesia doing what it always does, except this time, the geography of what it’s offering India happens to be extraordinary.


Where Sabang actually sits


Sabang is a small port town on Weh Island, off the absolute northern tip of Sumatra in Aceh province. Its deep-water berth can take vessels up to 50,000 tonnes, including, by Indonesian official’s own description, submarines, given water depths of around 40 meters close to shore. Geographically, it sits almost exactly astride the northern mouth of the Strait of Malacca, the funnel through which somewhere between a quarter and 40 percent of seaborne trade passes every year and as much as 80 percent of China’s crude oil imports.


Now look 160 kilometers northwest, across open water, to India’s Great Nicobar Island. India is building there, at an estimated cost of $9 billion and targeted for substantial completion by 2028, the Galathe Bay International Container Transshipment Terminal, alongside a dual-use military-civilian airport, a power plant and a new township. It is designed, unambiguously, to give India a permanent commercial and military foothold at a western gateway of the Malacca Strait; India’s own deep-water answer to Colombo, Singapore and Port Klang, all of which currently handle Indian transshipment cargo that should be handled at home. 


Geographic overview showing the proximity between Sabang Port and India's Andaman & Nicobar Islands across the 6° Channel.
Geographic overview showing the proximity between Sabang Port and India's Andaman & Nicobar Islands across the 6° Channel. 

What Sabang does is extend that foothold to the other side of the strait’s mouth onto Sumatran soil, without India having to build, own, or justify a base of its own on foreign territory. A functioning Indian-developed port at Sabang could plausibly host maritime surveillance assets, serve as a logistics and refueling point for the Indian Navy, and complement the Naval and air infrastructure coming up at Great Nicobar. Indian Coast Guard ships have already made goodwill visits to Sabang; the joint task force idea dates back to 2018; South Korea and Japan have both explored developing the port in the past. India’s own interest in Sabang, in fact, predates the 2018 announcement; conversations trace back to 2014-15, in the earliest days of Act East Policy. What makes 2026 different is that Jakarta finally has an economic incentive strong enough- the need to court Indian Capital for a genuinely underdeveloped province, to move past feasibility studies into an actual joint task force with deliverables. The optics vis-à-vis Beijing may be real, but they are not a driving force; Aceh’s development is.  Furthermore, this dual presence forces Beijing to calculate a steep “detour penalty”. If the northern mouth of Malacca becomes too heavily watched or insecure, China’s only maritime alternatives are to tankers south through Indonesia’s Sunda or Lombok Straits. Doing so tacks on three to five extra days of transit time and millions in additional fuel costs per voyage, transforming a strategic bottleneck into a permanent macroeconomic tax on Chinese energy imports. Put the two projects together and you get a rising power holding a physical, simultaneous presence on both flanks of a chokepoint that a geopolitical adversary depends on for its energy security. For India this could serve as another critical block in the broader architecture India has been assembling to counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific.


The real flashpoint


The term Malacca Dilemma - Malacca Kanju - was coined by Premier Hu Jintao, in 2003, in an internal Chinese Communist Party address, to describe Beijing’s own anxiety: that an overwhelming share of China’s energy imports and trade passes through a single, narrow, 2.8 km wide channel at its narrowest point, a channel China does not control, cannot easily defend and which a hostile navy could plausibly close in a crisis. That anxiety is precisely why China built the China- Myanmar oil pipeline, why it pushed the Kra canal idea in Thailand, why it has spent two decades trying to diversify overland energy routes through Central Asia and Pakistan, and why the entire ”String of Pearls” - a loose necklace of Chinese linked port access and dual-use facilities running from Haina through the South China Sea, Sittwe in Myanmar, Hambantota in Sri Lanka , Gwadar in Pakistan, and out toward Djibouti and Horn of Africa - exists in the first place. The String of Pearls, at its core, was always a hedge against the Malacca Dilemma, a way to give China’s navy reach and options along the sea lanes it fears losing. 


Here is the flashpoint: for two decades the Malacca Dilemma has been framed as a Chinese vulnerability that China tries to route around. What Sabang and Great Nicobar do, quietly, is relocate that same dilemma onto China’s own supply line at its single most concentrated pressure point, the mouth of the strait itself, except now it’s an Indian naval and logistics presence sitting on both sides of the door, not a Chinese one trying to build alternatives elsewhere. India isn’t just hedging against China’s presence in the Indian Ocean anymore. It is holding optionality over the very anxiety that built China’s entire Western Indian Ocean strategy in the first place. A chokepoint's power comes from asymmetry: whoever can close it or surveil it holds leverage over whoever depends on it. China has spent twenty years trying to reduce its dependence on Malacca precisely because it doesn't trust that dependence being visible to others. Indian assets on both banks of the strait's northern mouth, able, over time, to track tanker traffic, host maritime patrol aircraft, and provide contingency basing, make that dependence more visible and more exposed than at any point since Hu Jintao first named the problem. Yet, the operational mechanics of this set up rely on a strict division of labor that respects Jakarta’s geopolitical red lines. Sabang will never be an Indian sovereign military base, nor will Indonesia tolerate peacetime combat interdiction sorties launched from its soil against Chinese vessels. Instead, Sabang acts as the forward, dual-use sensor and logistics node, feeding real time targeting data back to Great Nicobar. In the event of a full-scale crisis, Sabang would not need to launch strikes directly; its value lies in completing the initial link of a distributed kill chain, enabling Indian forces to track and kinetically engage hostile enemy traffic right at the mouth of the choke point. 


Regional map of the Strait of Malacca, a critical maritime chokepoint carrying up to 80% of China’s oil imports.
Regional map of the Strait of Malacca, a critical maritime chokepoint carrying up to 80% of China’s oil imports.

String of Pearls vs Necklace of Diamonds 


The String of Pearls, first used in a 2005 U.S. defense contractor report, describes China's chain of port access from the South China Sea through Malacca and across the Indian Ocean to the Horn of Africa, Sittwe and Kyaukpyu in Myanmar, Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Gwadar in Pakistan, and Djibouti. India's long-standing critique is that many of these pearls were built on opaque, high-interest debt that left host nations exposed, with Hambantota's forced 99-year lease-back to China as the cautionary tale. India's answer, the Necklace of Diamonds, is a counter-network of naval access points from Duqm to Chabahar to Agalega to Sabang, built instead on equity partnerships and grant-based, genuinely dual-use infrastructure. Most of that necklace sits at the Indian Ocean's periphery, useful for reach but far from China's actual chokepoints. Sabang, paired with Great Nicobar, is different, it sits right in the funnel, the one diamond positioned exactly where the String of Pearls' whole logic gets tested in real time, and so far, it's structured as a joint task force, not a debt trap. Whether India can actually deliver on that promise, given its uneven record on projects like Chabahar and Mongla, is the real question that will decide if Sabang becomes a genuine diamond or just another aspirational one.


Conceptual map of India’s "Necklace of Diamonds" counter-network, spanning strategic maritime access points from Duqm to Sabang.
Conceptual map of India’s "Necklace of Diamonds" counter-network, spanning strategic maritime access points from Duqm to Sabang.
Strategic comparison mapping China’s "String of Pearls" alongside India’s "Necklace of Diamonds" across the Indian Ocean Region.
Strategic comparison mapping China’s "String of Pearls" alongside India’s "Necklace of Diamonds" across the Indian Ocean Region. 

Where this leaves the picture 


Two ports, barely a hundred nautical miles apart. One Indian, one Indonesian but built with Indian money and hands, now facing each other across the one channel that carries close to half the world's trade and most of the oil China burns. Sixteen agreements signed in Jakarta, a missile deal that puts Indian hardware into Southeast Asia's biggest military, and a host country that will keep doing business with Beijing regardless, because that is simply how Indonesia survives between great powers. None of this gives India a switch to shut Malacca off, and anyone who says otherwise is overselling it. What it gives India is quieter than that, and more useful. Right now, it means better eyes on the water: who's moving through, when, and how often. It's leverage that works precisely because nobody has to use it. But leverage like that doesn't stay theoretical forever. If a crisis ever puts India and China on opposite sides of something serious, a base at Sabang stops being about maritime domain awareness. However, denial in this bottleneck wouldn’t look like a crude, cinematic wartime blockade, which would violate UNCLOS transit passage laws and paralyze the economies of neutral neighbors like Japan and South Korea. Instead, it translates to high fidelity “shadow tracking” and selective interdiction capabilities. It gives the Indian Navy actionable intelligence required to monitor, identify and intercept specific Chinese state-owned vessels at a time and place of New Delhi’s choosing, making Beijing’s most important sea lane a little less certain, a little more watched, right when certainty matters the most. China spent two decades building a necklace of ports to escape a dependency it diagnosed in itself back in 2003. India didn't need the whole necklace. It just needed two stones, placed exactly where that old fear still lives. 


Sakshi Singh


Sakshi Singh holds a Master's degree in International Relations and Strategic Studies. Her work focuses on South Asian affairs, maritime security, national security, and foreign policy analysis. She closely studies defense and strategic developments to inform her analysis. She was previously a Research Fellow at Foresight, where she conducted security and threat assessments across a range of regional security initiatives, and is currently an intern at Meluha Maritime. Her publications include an analysis at Foresight on political party mergers and migration in post-protest Nepal and Bangladesh.


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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.

 
 
 

8 Comments

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guest1013
Jul 27

So nicely articulated 👍

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Mukta Singh
Jul 26
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

Excellent economic analysis.

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Sujibaba
Jul 26
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

Straight of Malacca has always been a Crucial post forward for India, south east asian countries has always tried to sabotage the route, it's only Bharat which can control the south asian route with diplomacy & counter act.

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Sharon
Jul 26
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

I liked the article it is very informative, good job

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Usha
Jul 26
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

Enriching

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