Moving Past 'Potential': Can America and India Become Real Partners?
by Sourabh Gupta
The US-India strategic partnership is either the most under-performing
bilateral relationship in the world or its most overrated.
As a new chapter in this relationship is written with the ascent of a
center-right government in New Delhi (whose earlier incarnation in the
late-1990s had in fact proclaimed the US and India to be ‘natural
allies’), the aura of hyperbole that permeates ties needs to be shed.
Equally, with John Kerry and Chuck Hagel having journeyed through New
Delhi over the past fortnight with proposals to deepen defense
cooperation, and with Prime Minister Narendra Modi due at the White
House in late-September, the conceptual gap in value systems and
national interests that has provoked this under-performance needs to be
internalized. Another decade-and-a-half of inflated expectations and
modest delivery in terms of strategic congruence would be a tragic
waste. It would also detract from both countries’ pursuit of a
fundamental interest that aligns their purposes in the Indo-Pacific: the
maintenance of a stable geo-political equilibrium.
With the passing of the bipolar international order and India’s own
shift toward market economics, it was assumed that the traditional
commonality of democratic values, complemented by an increasingly robust
set of inter-societal ties, would accentuate a dramatic convergence of
national interests between the two countries. Washington and New Delhi
were to be bound by a common interest in preventing Asia from being
dominated by China, eliminating threats posed by international terrorism
as well as by state sponsors of terrorism, arresting the spread of
weapons of mass destruction, promoting the spread of liberal democracy,
deepening expansion of the international economic and trading order, and
securing the global commons, especially the sea lines of communication.
Aside from a growing convergence on proliferation-related interests,
little of this bold agenda has come to pass or is set to materialize in
the years ahead. China-India ties have witnessed more top-level
political and defense ministerial exchanges over the past couple of
years than between the US and India; the road to AfPak stabilization and
troop drawdown runs unchanged through Rawalpindi; Washington, DC and
New Delhi occupy opposite poles at practically every multilateral trade,
economic, and environment negotiation; India’s non-prescriptive
practice of democracy enlargement and non bloc-based approach to
securing the commons contrasts with America’s more advocacy-based and a
la carte prone model. If anything, the gap between the two countries’
world views and policies on international and regional matters has
widened.
In the afterglow of the US-India civil nuclear agreement, a narrower but
seemingly more congruent set of geo-strategic and defense objectives
was also envisioned. First, New Delhi would assist Washington in curbing
Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Second, New Delhi would align with the major
maritime democracies of the Indo-Pacific and countervail Chinese power.
The veiled possibility of interdicting Chinese sea-bound commerce in the
narrow Andaman Sea during an East Asian contingency was a closely-held
card. Third, India would cooperate in HA/DR missions and post-conflict
reconstruction efforts, including those not mandated or commanded under a
UN flag, on both sides of the Indian Ocean. And, fourth, India would
provide access at strategic locations across its territory to US
military forces – perhaps even ‘over-the-horizon’ rotational bases, down
the line, to deter or manage contingencies in West and East Asia.
Again, aside from gradual cooperation on Iran oil sanctions, little of
this ambition has come to pass. Far from growing into its designated
role as the US deputy sheriff in the Indian Ocean region (and perhaps
someday as a co-partner across the Indo-Pacific region), New Delhi has
double downed on its autonomist leanings. It has resisted participating
in major multi-service combined exercises that prepare for high-end
operational missions, stayed away from stationing personnel at US
combatant command headquarters, turned down a series of foundational
pacts that would have enhanced logistics and battle-group networking,
opted for Russian rather than US high-precision, military-grade
navigation signals, opted to strip out tactical interoperability aids
(high-end electronics and avionics suites) while purchasing US-origin
platforms (P8I and C-130J aircraft), and even allegedly passed up the
opportunity to buy a to-be decommissioned supercarrier – the USS Kitty
Hawk – for free! (so long as New Delhi agreed to purchase five dozen or
so Super Hornet fighters to be operated off the carrier). Defense ties
with Japan and Australia too have been limited to the odd naval
exercise, with little scope for logistics sharing or information
exchange envisaged.
Some $15 billion of US defense hardware sales – not doctrine-sharing
exchanges, harmonized force postures or command and control systems
integration – has been the sole deliverable for all the exertions. The
failure has not been one of effort (or will); rather it has been one of
conception.
The disappointments have not tempered the belief of the faithful.
Undaunted, it is argued that with the departure of the previous
government and its long-serving, proto-socialist defense minister, US
and India defense – and particularly military mil ties – stand poised to
once again break out of policy stagnation.
Washington and New Delhi, it is counseled, should reauthorize and update
their 2005 Defense Framework agreement (which they indeed must) to
enable collaboration in multinational operations of common interest. The
Indian Navy has possessed this latitude to participate in such muscular
activities, yet chose to operate its anti-piracy missions in the Indian
Ocean region independent of the US-organized Combined Maritime Forces
command. Washington should place military intelligence exchanges on the
front-burner and formalize institutional links to share classified
information on the region. Navy-to-navy intelligence exchange was a key
accomplishment of the 2005 Defense Framework agreement, yet the channel
lapsed by the end of the decade due to disclosure policy guidelines that
limited sharing of actionable or desirable information.
Washington should deepen service-to-service engagements and incorporate
service chiefs and regional commanders within institutionalized policy
mechanisms, given the military’s visibly friendlier interest in such
ties. While civilian masters in the Indian Defense Ministry’s planning
and international cooperation wing have been a rotten impediment, the
roots of New Delhi’s civil-military dysfunction in fact stem from the
unwillingness of senior uniformed folks to shed their operational
command profile and assume a policy advisory role. A unified services
command and an integrated civil-military MoD is nowhere in sight.
Finally, Washington should use the recent DTI initiative (defense trade
initiative in the US, defense technology initiative for New Delhi) to
graduate the defense sales relationship beyond the buyer-seller model to
one of co-development and co-production. Again, while unimpeachable in
intent, New Delhi’s expansive definition of technology sharing tends to
be confined not just to technology itself but the entire know-how behind
how a technology is produced, including systems integration and the
overall intellectual capital development. The Initiative also risks
being oversold in both capitals: it elevates India to one among
three-dozen defense partners in terms of preferential categorization –
not one among a half-dozen or so such countries as has been advertised.
At bottom, operating in denial of past lessons risks repeating those errors.
In important respects, the questions that went unanswered 15 years ago
remain valid today: what is the template by which one operationalizes a
defense and strategic partnership with a critically important country
that will never be a treaty ally (and is the primary antagonist of a
‘non-NATO ally’ – Pakistan), yet is more than just a friendly,
non-hostile state? Can enhanced defense cooperation and technology
handouts infuse a strategic congruence or must the causality run the
other way? If technology sharing boosts India’s autonomous defense
capability, then does it not detract from the fundamental purpose of
deepening ‘jointness’? If New Delhi, of its own accord, bears a larger
share of the region’s security burden, what is its imperative to
simultaneously tighten its roles and missions ‘jointness’ with US forces
in the region?
The bestowal of an incredibly generous civil nuclear deal as well as the
mainstreaming of New Delhi within the international technology-sharing
regime, at a moment of US primacy, did not furnish the desired answer to
these questions. In the more constrained age ahead, it is not clear why
New Delhi’s strategic calculation vis-à-vis the US will be any more
favorable now. Although China’s rise and behavior could supply this
rationale, Beijing is a key pivot in India’s multi-aligned foreign
policy strategy and successive governments in New Delhi have seen
greater wisdom in operating in the slipstream of Beijing’s meteoric rise
than by aligning against it. New Delhi appears to defer to the core
interests, principles, and (economic) content laid out in the Xi Jinping
government’s ‘new type of great power relations’ and periphery
diplomacy initiatives than most other governments in the Indo-Pacific.
That most observers continue to implicitly - and lazily - base the
‘natural’ convergence of US and Indian interest in Asia on the belief
that China and India are irrevocably locked in strategic competition
may, to the contrary, provide a hint as to why Washington’s relationship
with New Delhi has serially fallen short of expectations.
The future of US-India strategic ties is too important to be constructed
solely or even primarily through a China-management lens. The defense
cooperation elements within this relationship - joint exercises,
intelligence exchange, arms deals, technology-sharing, weapons
co-development and co-production, etc. – should be constructed rather on
more modest but firmer foundations that are geared to nudging the
Indo-Pacific region’s multilateral security relations toward a more
consociational model of international relations where power is shared
and balanced within. Embracing and working through the balance between
autonomy and alignment in the US-India strategic partnership will also
lock the two countries in a strategic embrace that will favor freedom in
the long run.
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