RAND and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) convened an in-person Track II Dialogue on January 12, 2024, at ORF's office in New Delhi, India. ORF is a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on security, strategy, economy, development, energy, and global governance. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, this dialogue addressed Russian advanced conventional weapon proliferation and allowed participants to present perspectives on the security environment in Asia and how the war in Ukraine has changed this environment. The Track II Dialogue consisted of three panels of both RAND and ORF experts. The first panel discussed the impact of Russia's continued war in Ukraine on Russian weapon exports and the potential for China to benefit from countries' efforts to pivot away from Russian weapons. The second panel discussed India's decisions to import systems or develop systems indigenously. The final panel discussed the impact of the war in Ukraine on Asia and Asia-Pacific security broadly. These conference proceedings contain six papers — three each by RAND and ORF authors — that were written for this dialogue. This publication provides a summary of the event, conclusions drawn from the dialogue, and the full text of all six papers. It can help inform foreign and defense policy officials in both the United States and India who are responsible for U.S.-Indian relations, bilateral defense cooperation, and defense policy.

In this report, the authors explore the equities of four middle powers — Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom — and the roles that they might play in deterring or limiting conflict between China and Taiwan over the Taiwan Strait. A country's equities are its long-term interests in a scenario, such as a cross-Strait conflict. Middle powers are nations that are not small but lack the sheer size and influence to significantly disrupt the global order. However, middle-power countries can influence international affairs through mediation and institution-building, and middle powers can also play a balancing role between adversarial great powers. The authors use four countries — Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom — to conduct a case-study analysis on how middle powers perceive China's interests and their own nations' interests in a cross-Strait conflict. The authors held discussions with analysts and policymakers from each middle-power nation on such topics as whether these nations would support Taiwan in a cross-Strait conflict, the threats that China might perceive from these nations, and whether the respondents think that China would initiate a conflict with Taiwan. The authors supplemented these discussions with an open-source literature review on how middle powers have been defined historically to support their analysis of each middle power's equities in a potential cross-Strait conflict. Finally, the authors offer several recommendations for future middle-power strategies that might be useful to policymakers in Taiwan, the United States, and middle powers with a stake in the Asia-Pacific region.

In recent years, China's aspiration for global technology leadership has driven its significant investments in artificial intelligence (AI) for national security, economic growth, and societal well-being. Although there is increasing research and analysis on China's domestic AI development ecosystems and drivers, the details of China's development-financed AI exports remain elusive. Despite being the single-largest provider of foreign development assistance, Beijing does not participate in aid or debt transparency initiatives. To address this gap, researchers from the RAND Corporation and AidData jointly built a new database on China's AI export projects that are funded with official development financing: China's AI Exports Database (CAIED). CAIED uses data from multiple public databases and indexes related to China's global financing and recipient countries' electoral democracy, freedom, and data protection and privacy status. In this report, the authors analyze this quantitative dataset — adding qualitative country case studies based on interviews and social media analysis — to examine the distribution, technology, financing, and data safety aspects of China's AI exports.