evidence: The China-India frontier is comprised of two major "sectors": the western sector includes the vast but mostly uninhabited Himalayan territory of Aksai Chin (part of the larger Kashmir dispute that also [...] Nepal and Bhutan. India and China both claim the entirety of Aksai Chin, and Beijing formally claims all of India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, calling it "South Tibet." (U.S. policy has long recognized the McMahon Line and Arunachal Pradesh’s status as an Indian state.) In the 1990s, India and China signed agreements t o maintain peace and tranquility along the frontier (1993) while pursuing confidence- building measures (1996), yet 22 rounds of subsequent Special Representative-level talks failed to settle outstanding territorial claims. Prior to the latest clash, the last major confrontation was in 2017, when military conflict nearly erupted over Chinese infrastructure projects near