It has been argued that the US-India relationship stands in its own right, beyond the shared concern over China. It is my contention, however, that if we take away the China component, the relationship suffers from unavoidable distress
The recently concluded Quad foreign ministers’ meeting, held in Australia, sent a message to China and set an expansive Indo-Pacific agenda — in terms of vaccine partnership, tackling climate change, countering disinformation campaigns, terrorism, ensuring cybersecurity, building resilient supply chains, quality infrastructure and enhancing the availability of “trusted” critical technologies.
The security dimension received equal stress. The commitment to advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific, free from coercion and adhering to a maritime rules-based order was reaffirmed upfront.
There was a lot of focus on defining what the Quad stands for, and we find resolve to deliver timely HADR assistance, strengthening people-to-people linkages through scholarship programs, think-tank dialogues etc, as the four foreign ministers pointed out in their joint press conference.
The grouping is evidently getting more and more institutionalized. What started as a maritime framework to shape China’s behaviour in Indo-Pacific region and allow a latticework of bilaterals, trilaterals and minilaterals to thrive underneath, is now a vibrant partnership of four ‘like-minded’ Indo-Pacific democracies with an expansive security, economic and humanitarian agenda.
There are even talks of expanding the alliance with addition of ‘dialogue partners’.
For all its progress, however, India remains the driving force and its increasingly close strategic partnership with the United States is both the fulcrum and fuel for Quad. This was attested to by the Joe Biden administration in its newly released Indo-Pacific Strategy that built on the Donald Trump administration document and reasserted India’s central role in the policy, seeking to “support a strong India as a partner” and advancing America’s “Major Defense Partnership with India and support its role as a net security provider… to promote stability in South Asia.”
Worth noting that post the release of the document, a White House official called India “a likeminded partner and leader in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, active in and connected to the Southeast Asia, a driving force of the Quad, and an engine for regional growth and development.”
It has been argued that the US-India relationship stands in its own right, beyond the shared concern over China. It is my contention, however, that if we take away the China component, the relationship suffers from unavoidable distress.
It turns out that despite a steady dovetailing of defence and security interests, and a legacy of close people-to-people and state-to-state ties, the positive verbiage fails to hide the intrinsic lack of trust that still pervades the partnership.
The difference in US strategic objectives, its championing of hawkish liberalism, cultural aggression and an expansionist foreign policy that seeks to cast the world in its image, especially among nations with which it enjoys considerable power deferential, makes it difficult for America to be a reliable, non-treaty partner for India.
Faced with an aggressive China that seeks to stifle India, dominate Asia and eventually become the global hegemon, India requires certain assistance from the US to balance China’s power. India’s objective is to stave off Chinese threat to India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and facilitate own rise.
Though it may lend itself to issue-based geopolitical alliances if it is in national interest to do so, India’s post-colonial memory and a strategic culture that shuns military blocs preclude it from joining treaty alliances. By way of external balancing, therefore, India needs diplomatic, economic, technological, military, logistical and intelligence support from the US and its allies’ network to create deterrence and act as the net security provider in the region.
Here, the interests of India and the US converge, since New Delhi’s status as a continental and maritime power and a democratic bulwark against an authoritarian China helps the US maintain favourable balance of power in Indo-Pacific. This equilibrium is disturbed if a partner becomes distracted or pursues policies that are antithetical to common objectives.
While it is not necessary, or even possible, for partners and allies to achieve alignment of all interests, distress is inevitable when primary strategic objectives are at cross purposes with each other.
For India and the US, the difference in policy and outlook on Russia was always going to be an issue to be managed in bilateral ties, but Ukraine crisis has put on it a ticking time bomb. It is difficult to see how the partners may reconcile their differences despite best intentions.
Though India doesn’t want Russia to invade Ukraine as much as US and NATO do not, its move to abstain from a vote on the Ukraine issue at the UN Security Council on 31 January and calling for “quiet and constructive diplomacy” and “full implementation of the Minsk Package” are in keeping with its national interest, divergent strategic objectives and self-image as a leading power that won’t be pressurized to choose one strategic partner over another.
As C Raja Mohan writes in Foreign Policy “the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed New Delhi to hold onto its past relationship with Moscow while expanding its ties with Washington. But growing U.S.-Russian tensions… have begun to constrict India’s room for maneuvering between the major powers. Any escalation of the crisis over Ukraine would further squeeze India’s position.”
From India’s perspective, not only is the growing US-Russia tension detrimental to its interests, but more damaging for New Delhi is the prospect of its most important Indo-Pacific partner focusing on the wrong enemy.
There’s no point debating the chicken-and-egg question of whether NATO’s continued eastward expansion has forced Vladimir Putin’s hand or whether Russian revanchism has forced erstwhile USSR states to veer towards NATO.
The short point is that Putin wants to overhaul Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture to prevent further encroaching of NATO in former USSR territory that Russia considers its ‘near abroad‘ — with brute force if required — and the US has once again readily adopted the role of Europe’s primary security provider despite major European powers possessing the ability to challenge, match and even overcome Russian military prowess.
This arrangement is not only imposing steeper costs on a US that has gone past the unipolar moment, and is faced with an authoritarian peer competitor abroad and a polarizing and acrimonious socio-political climate at home, it is also depleting America’s ability to stay focused and measure up to its primary threat — China — in its “priority theater of operations” — Indo-Pacific.
The issue of Russia, however, is a red flag for the US.
As Rajan Menon writes in Defense Priorities, “The dynamic persists because American leaders do not want a change in the status quo. One of the enduring legacies of post-World War II American primacy is the US foreign and national security community–the executive and legislative branches of government, the media, academic specialists, and think tanks–remains convinced a stable world order cannot exist unless the US maintains, and regularly displays, its preponderance, lest adversaries become challengers and dominoes start to fall.”
From its vantage point, India sees a Biden administration consumed with the “Russian invasion of Ukraine”, with the US president giving daily dose of dire predictions, finding newer ways of saying the same thing, sending more troops to eastern Europe and the entire administrative machinery obsessing over every step that Putin does or does not take.
As US secretary of state Antony Blinken acknowledged recently, “We have had, I believe, more meetings, calls, and video engagements with our allies on this than anything I can think of in recent memory.”
Predictably, western media has jumped at the chance of coming up with grim forecasts that grow more outlandish each day. For instance, “US estimates” apparently “suggest that Russia could decapitate the government in Kyiv within two days, cause up to 50,000 civilian casualties and make up to five million Ukrainians refugees. This would make such a conflict the biggest crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War.”
The American commentariat and natsec community are trying to outdo each other with asphyxiating rhetoric on how the crisis may decide the fate of Biden’s presidency, why even tough economic sanctions won’t be enough and an American and coalition force must be dispatched to defend Ukraine, why the US must prepare for war and why the US needs to focus both on Russia and China.
The last point has generated heated debate among policymakers, wonks and commentators. The Biden administration believes that the US has no choice but to confront Russia and enforce the rules-based order or risk its erosion by malignant actors elsewhere such as in Indo-Pacific. The Pentagon believes that the US can both “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
The sensitiveness of Russia as a domestic political issue makes it harder for Biden — who is also facing low ratings ahead of midterms — to treat the issue with a degree of calm. The temptation for Democrats to whip up a Russian distraction to address the domestic political challenge cannot be dismissed.
US fixation and muscle-flexing over Russia, however, creates doubts in Asia on whether the US is getting too distracted over an issue that is peripheral to their strategic interests and whether Washington indeed has the means to “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Ashley Townshend of University of Sydney writes in Foreign Policy that as “Beijing’s aim is to ultimately win without fighting by employing gray-zone coercion under the shadow of its conventional military might, a muscular US policy in Ukraine would actually serve Chinese interests by sapping US power and reducing Washington’s focus on the Indo-Pacific.”
Granted, grand strategies frequently clash with issues of the day and adversaries do get a vote on long-term planning, but this is where the US needs to identify China as the country that “is likely to be a more powerful competitor” for the US “than the Soviet Union was in its prime” and therefore Washington must make difficult trade-offs instead of trying to be everywhere at once, and consequently spreading itself thin.
Elbridge A Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development who helped draft the 2018 US National Defense Strategy under Trump administration, and Oriana Skylar Mastro, who serves in the US Air Force Reserve as a strategic planner at US Indo-Pacific Command, argue in Wall Street Journal that getting distracted in Europe will hamper America’s ability to take on China because critical resources are finite for even the world’s mightiest military.
They write, “The US should remain committed to NATO’s defense but husband its critical resources for the primary fight in Asia, and Taiwan in particular. Denying China the ability to dominate Asia is more important than anything that happens in Europe… America’s European allies are in a better position to take on Russia than America’s Asian allies are to deal with China.”
A distracted US is a suboptimal actor for its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific. The complications are greater for India. If tension ratchets up even more between the US and Russia, India may find its calibrated stance of neutrality becoming untenable and having to decide between partners both of whom are vital to its strategic interests.
There could be expectations of reciprocity and renewed domestic pressure on Biden administration to impose CAATSA sanctions on India, not only over S-400 missile system but also future defence deals.
There could be more repercussions. As former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal points out in New Indian Express, India’s “investment plans in Russia’s energy sector and in the development of its Far East, in general, would become problematic, especially by the reluctance of the private sector to fall afoul of the complex US sanctions.”
The biggest worry of all for India would be a further tightening of the Russia-China-Pakistan axis. Russia will act as a force multiplier for India’ adversaries in the region, and a Beijing-dependent Moscow will find even less reasons to take cognizance of India’s worries.
Beyond the strategic divergence on Russia, the India-US partnership faces additional pressures. The newly released Indo-Pacific strategy document is high on rhtoric and low on actual resource commitments.
As noted strategic expert Ashley Tellis pointed out to Prashant Jha of Hindustan Times “for all the accentuated rhetoric, the administration’s engagement and investment in Indo-Pacific is still relatively modest and involves pursuing low-hanging fruit, such as investing in the Quad or holding summit-level meetings. There is a big deficit in terms of both the military investments in the Indo-Pacific strategy and, more visibly, the trade dimension, at a time when the regional economies are still deeply integrated with China.”
This matters. In absence of a trade framework to give China a viable competition in Indo-Pacific, the US and its alliances are no match for China that correctly identifies trade as the currency of geopolitical domination. While Biden administration is stuck between a rock and a hard place at home over an Indo-Pacific trade policy, its Indo-Pacific Strategy appears to be a diluted version of the Trump administration document and adopts a visibly softer rhetoric to describe China’s malignant actions in the region.
Jeff Smith of the Heritage Foundation writes in Defense One that the document and the fact sheet “are worryingly short on concrete proposals and creative ideas for meeting the China challenge. Indeed, Biden’s strategy says virtually nothing about the military competition with China or the steps necessary to roll back its intimidation of allies and partners.”
Moving ahead of these discrepancies and deficiencies, the issue that plagues bilateral ties is the lack of trust that results from America’s weaponization of normative frameworks, lack of respect towards civilizational differences, evangelism of hawkish liberalism and an interventionist foreign policy that remains rooted still to the lost unipolar moment.
It is understandable if the US employs some of these tools to meet the ideological challenge of China, a near peer competitor that offers a radically different view of the world, but the targeting of fellow democratic travellers out of a misguided sense of cultural and moral superiority creates bad blood between partners. There are countless examples of discord introduced into the relationship due to America’s penchant for interfering in India’s internal events stemming from cultural arrogance.
As a vibrant democracy, India will have public debates from time to time. The ongoing hijab controversy is a case in point. Amid the cacophony on display, the debate is being addressed at various levels with the judiciary seized of the issue. There was little need for a US government official to wade into the controversy with the certitude of a self-appointed referee, even as external affairs minister S Jaishankar was meeting his US counterpart Antony Blinken in Melbourne in a Quad meeting.
India’s external affairs ministry pointed out that such “motivated comments on our internal issues” that ignores the validity of India’s “constitutional framework and mechanisms, as well as our democratic ethos and polity” are “not welcome.”
That, however, did not deter US lawmaker and known India-baiter Ilhan Omar from commenting on the issue. Omar, an Islamofascist, who has been accused in the past of being a terror apologist and an anti-Semitist, was named ‘American Muslim Public Servant of 2021’ in December by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), an Islamic advocacy group based in Washington that has also commented on the issue.
CAIR’s lobbying against the democratically-elected Narendra Modi government is well known. The organization in the past been accused of trying to get the “Chicago City Council, one of the most powerful city councils in the US after New York”, to pass a resolution “critical of India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the human rights situation in the country.”
Apart from lobbying by various malcontents, that find surprisingly sympathetic ear among American lawmakers and administrators, judgments are regularly passed on the validity and robustness of Indian democracy, which are then used as narrative-setting tools by US-based commentariat focused on India ostensibly because they feel Indians who vote to choose their own government lack maturity and mental faculty to do so.
And then there is US media, that act as the cat’s paw in America’s holy crusade to “baptize all nations in liberal ideals.” A few headlines on the how the media has treated the truckers’ protests in Canada and how it interpreted the farmers’ protests in India, will illustrate the point. See here and here. Additionally, see here and here.
The point being made is that cultural arrogance and moral superiority makes America a narcissistic and unreliable partner for India, that despite the power deferential, deserves to be treated as an equal in the partnership.
The China factor may act as the glue to these differences, but papering over the cracks do not make them go away.
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