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* Dalai Lama Announces Clear Succession Plan

* The Supreme U.S. Leader

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

Dalai Lama Not the Last of the Line!

The Dalai Lama has announced that he will definitely have a successor after his death, continuing a centuries-old tradition that has become a flashpoint in the struggle with China’s Communist Party over Tibet’s future (CNN/ Simone McCarthy & Tenzin Dharpo, July 2).

Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual leader made the definitive declaration last week in a video message to religious elders gathered in Dharamshala, India, where the Nobel Peace laureate has lived since fleeing Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese Communist rule in 1959.

“I am affirming that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue,” the Dalai Lama said in a pre-recorded video, citing requests he received over the years from Tibetans and Tibetan religious leaders urging him to do so.

“The Gaden Phodrang Trust has sole authority to recognize the future reincarnation; no one else has any such authority to interfere in this manner,” he added, using the formal name for the office of the Dalai Lama.

The office should carry out the procedures of search and recognition of the future Dalai Lama “in accordance with past tradition,” he said, without revealing further details on the process.

The Dalai Lama had previously stated that when he is about 90 years old, he will consult the high lamas of Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan public to re-evaluate whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue.

Wednesday’s announcement – delivered days before his 90th birthday last Sunday – sets the stage for a high-stakes battle over his succession, between Tibetan leaders in exile and China’s atheist Communist Party, which insists it alone holds the authority to approve and appoint the next Dalai Lama.

Asked about the Dalai Lama’s statement, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry reiterated Beijing’s long-held stance that the spiritual leader’s reincarnation must comply with the Chinese laws and regulations, with search and identification conducted in China proper and approved by the central government.

In a memoir published in March, the Dalai Lama states that his successor will be born in the “free world” outside China, urging his followers to reject any candidate selected by Beijing.

[This means that the next child-candidate could be ‘discovered’ anywhere there is a vibrant Tibetan community, including Europe and the U.S. However, the chances are more likely that such a candidate will emerge from the Tibetan centres in India, Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal.

If the child-candidate is ‘discovered’ outside of India, the whole process will be accompanied with the utmost secrecy, and the ‘revelation’ will not be announced until the 15th Dalai Lama is safely established in Dharamshala].

That could lead to the emergence of two rival Dalai Lamas: one ‘chosen’ by his predecessor, the other by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“Both the Tibetan exile community and the Chinese government want to influence the future of Tibet, and they see the next Dalai Lama as the key to do so,” said Ruth Gamble, an expert in Tibetan history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Samdhong Rinpoche, a senior official at the Dalai Lama’s office, told reporters last Wednesday that any further information about the procedures or methods of the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation would not be revealed to the public until the succession rituals take place (CNN).

Struggle over succession

Over a lifetime in exile, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, has become synonymous with Tibet and its quest for genuine autonomy under Beijing’s tightening grip on the Himalayan region.

From his adopted hometown of Dharamshala, where he established a government-in-exile, the spiritual leader has unified Tibetans at home and in exile and elevated their struggle onto the global stage.

That has made the Dalai Lama a persistent thorn in the side of Beijing, which denounces him as a dangerous “separatist” and a “wolf in monk’s robes”.

Since the 1970s, the Dalai Lama has maintained that he no longer seeks full independence for Tibet, but “meaningful” autonomy that would allow Tibetans to preserve their distinct culture, religion, and identity.

His commitment to the nonviolent “middle way” approach has earned him international support and recognition, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

The Dalai Lama has long been wary of Beijing’s attempt to meddle with the reincarnation system of Tibetan Buddhism.

Tibetan Buddhists believe in the cycle of rebirth, and that when an enlightened spiritual master like the Dalai Lama dies, he will be able to choose the place and time of his rebirth through the force of compassion and prayer.

But the religious tradition has increasingly become a battleground for the control of Tibetan hearts and minds, especially since the contested reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second-highest religious figure in the region.

In 1995, years after the death of the 10th Panchen Lama, Beijing installed its own Panchen Lama, in defiance of the Dalai Lama, whose choice for the role – a six-year-old boy – and his parents have since vanished from public view.

Under Tibetan tradition, the Dalai Lamas and the Panchen Lamas have long played key roles in recognizing each other’s reincarnations.

Experts believe Beijing will seek to interfere in the current Dalai Lama’s succession in a similar way.

There’s a whole series of high-level reincarnated lamas cultivated by the Chinese government to collaborate with it inside Tibet,” Gamble said.

“There’s been a long-term plan to work toward this.”

A “resolution of gratitude” statement released by Tibetan Buddhist religious leaders gathering in Dharamsala on Wednesday said they “strongly condemn the People’s Republic of China’s usage of reincarnation subject for their political gain” and “will never accept it.”  

For his part, the current Dalai Lama has made clear that any candidate appointed by Beijing will hold no legitimacy in the eyes of Tibetans or followers of Tibetan Buddhism.

“It is totally inappropriate for Chinese Communists, who explicitly reject religion, including the idea of past and future lives, to meddle in the system of reincarnation of lamas, let alone that of the Dalai Lama,” he writes in his latest memoir, “Voice of the Voiceless” (CNN).

Trump: The ‘Hyper-President’

“Five months into his second term, it is clear that Donald Trump is trying to remake American executive power in fundamental ways,” University of Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg writes for the online magazine Persuasion.

As a result, checks and balances are being weakened, and executive power is discovering unlimited expansion.

Ginsburg harkens back to a term scholars have used to describe some of the (often charismatic) power-hoarding leaders in Latin American presidential government systems in the 20th century: ‘hyper-presidentialism’, in which a president seeks to expand executive power and turns politics into a set of zero-sum competitions that destabilize democracy (Fareed Zakaria/Chris Good, CNN/Fareed’s Global Briefing, July 3, 2025).

“For example,” Ginsburg writes, “Trump has sought to cajole private institutions into submission, with law firms and universities at the top of the list .  .  .

“The administration has also waged war against the administrative state, undertaking multiple moves to make federal workers easier to fire .  .  .

“Also in the president’s crosshairs is the independence of government agencies .  .  .

“Meanwhile, the administration has asserted the authority to impound funds that had been appropriated by Congress, in direct violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 .  .  .

“Finally, the president has been hyperactive in the realm of foreign policy .  .  .

How abnormal is Trump’s use of executive power?

Historian and Yale professor Julian E. Zelizer writes in a Foreign Policy essay that other US presidents have acted unilaterally, but their approaches were different.

“When Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, he did so during the Civil War, to avert secessionist rioting and rebellion that would destroy the Constitution,” Zelizer writes .  .  .

“Congress was out of session, and bringing lawmakers back in that era would have taken time. As soon as Congress returned, he explained his actions and requested congressional approval .  .  .

“After the Supreme Court ruled that Truman could not seize the steel mills, he immediately relinquished them .  .  .

“Even Nixon complied when the Supreme Court decided in July 1974 that he had to turn over the White House 

“Trump is different, as demonstrated by his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election .  .  .

“Trump is also protected by a hyperpartisan Republican-majority Congress .  .  .

“Until another period of reckoning, as occurred in the 1970s [when executive power was reined in after the Watergate scandal], the United States will remain vulnerable to still more renegade leaders who can threaten the standing of the country’s great democracy.”

End of the Road for US World Dominance?

They had a good run, those United States of America, but the world is poised to move on.

That’s the arguments made in two substantial essays in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, both reflecting on US dominance in world affairs, which has lasted since the end of World War II, and how Trump is undoing it.

Sketching the “end of the long American century,” scholars Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. [who created the concept of “soft power” in International Relations] write that by “coercing” allies and acting nationalistically and unilaterally, Trump is diminishing US power.

“By assailing interdependence, [Trump] undercuts the very foundation of American power,” they write.

“The power associated with trade is hard power, based on material capabilities .  .  .

“But over the past 80 years, the United States has accumulated soft power, based on attraction rather than coercion or the imposition of costs .  .  .

“Wise American policy would maintain, rather than disrupt, patterns of interdependence that strengthen American power, both the hard power derived from trade relationships and the soft power of attraction .  .  .

“The continuation of Trump’s current foreign policy would weaken the United States and accelerate the erosion of the international order that since World War II has served so many countries well – most of all, the United States.”

Kori Schake, a foreign and defence policy adviser and analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, argues also in Foreign Affairs that for many of the same reasons, the U.S. is no longer the “indispensable nation”   described by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albricht.

As Trump seeks maximum returns on every US relationship, Shake identifies a common assumption: that liberal democracies and US friends lack alternatives.

They may bristle at Trump’s America, but they still like it better than Russia or China.

That assumption is fundamentally wrong, Shake argues, calling it the product of “failure of imagination” – a cardinal sin in geopolitical strategy.

Other states can indeed pull away, Shake writes.

That might begin slowly, with heads of state [or governments] avoiding White House visits.

NATO could cancel a summit to deprive Trump an opportunity to grandstand against alliance members, or countries declining to buy US treasury bills and bonds (or insisting on higher interest rates, which would make America’s heavy public debt more expensive to maintain). 

“In the years to come, the alliance it took decades to foster will begin to wither, and U.S. rivals will waste no time in leaping to exploit the resulting vacuum,” Schake writes.

“Some of Washington’s partners may wait for a while, hoping that their American friends will come to their senses and try to re-establish something akin to the traditional U.S. leadership role .  .  .

“But there is no going all the way back; their faith and trust have been irreparably damaged .  .  .

“And they won’t wait long, even for an American return to form what would amount to less than a full restoration. Soon, they will move on – and so will the rest of the world.”

The writer can be reached at:

shashimalla125@gmail.com

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