India should take to heart former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s prescient observation that “China, a nation of foreign and security policy realists, respects strategic strength and is contemptuous of vacillation and weakness.” After all, one of the lessons of the 1962 war was that a vacillating response to Chinese aggression is self-defeating, particularly in situations like that posed by the incursion at Daulat Beg Oldie.