The Folly of India’s Neutrality

Narendra Modi is preparing to make his eighth visit to the United States as India’s prime minister. Although previous U.S. administrations have received Modi warmly, the fanfare surrounding this trip—the Indian prime minister’s first official state visit to Washington—will be unparalleled. He is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress. And as a parting gift, Modi will likely leave the United States having secured a long-coveted deal for General Electric to share technology and jointly produce military jet engines with India.

Such an enthusiastic reception is undoubtedly intended to reset relations with India. Although both countries are ostensibly committed to a partnership, the U.S.-Indian relationship has not lived up to its potential in recent years. The United States must shoulder some of the blame for this failure. Successive U.S. administrations ignored India’s warnings about negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Biden administration has continued to pursue a relationship with India’s rival Pakistan even after U.S. priorities in Asia have shifted toward dealing with China. Washington has also flubbed more routine diplomatic issues such as visa processing, with record backlogs in U.S. consulates in India that only recently ebbed. And it took more than two years for the U.S. Senate to confirm former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as ambassador to India, hampering Washington’s ability to advance its interests in New Delhi.

For their part, U.S. officials seem to be waking up to the promises—and the limits—of a strong relationship with India. It is unclear whether the same can be said for Indian leaders. New Delhi continues to harbor a variety of misgivings about forging a genuine partnership with the United States. Despite ongoing clashes at the disputed border with China, India has resisted embracing its security partnership with Australia, Japan, and the United States—known as the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—designed to protect the Indo-Pacific from Chinese aggression. At the same time, both Modi and his foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, have been praised at home for their staunch refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This stance of neutrality, they have argued, best serves India’s interests. Since the invasion in February 2022, India has undoubtedly benefited from a steady supply of cheap Russian oil as the Kremlin has scrambled to secure alternative buyers for its energy commodities. But New Delhi’s relations with Moscow occupy a shrinking portion of Indian foreign policy. In the long run, Russia’s growing dependence on China will make it an unreliable partner.

India rightly wants to guarantee itself strategic autonomy as it continues to rise in the world. But such a vision will not be fully realized if India continues to imagine that it can indefinitely play to all sides. Nonalignment may work in specific instances, but it will not serve India well in the long term. Instead, India should forge a strong partnership with the United States. With U.S. support, India can reassert its control over South Asia and emerge as a strong pole of regional order in the Indo-Pacific.

TIME WARP

Most of India’s concerns about the United States hark back to another era in global politics. New Delhi, it seems, is caught in a time warp. Key members of India’s foreign policy elite remain fixated on the United States’ relationship with Pakistan during the Cold War and fear its renewal. This belief, although perhaps understandable given the record of U.S. policy toward South Asia, is nevertheless flawed: the United States and Pakistan have never been and are not now as close as Indian policymakers tend to imagine them to be. It is to the credit of the Trump administration that the United States finally called Pakistan’s bluff and terminated all military aid. Since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, some in the Biden administration have proposed a limited strategic relationship with Pakistan focused on counterterrorism. But Washington’s efforts to secure this new partnership with Islamabad have been halting at best. Although some U.S. foreign policy thinkers still support Pakistan over India, the Beltway establishment is finally recognizing India’s primacy in South Asia. There is little reason to believe that the United States, whether under this administration or a future one, would want to resurrect its old alliance with Pakistan, especially if it comes at the expense of a partnership with India.

India’s supremacy in its neighborhood is not challenged by Pakistan or the United States but instead by China. In Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and even within India’s own borders, China represents an existential threat to New Delhi’s strategic autonomy. Indian and Chinese soldiers have massed along the disputed mountainous border between the two countries, with bloody skirmishes breaking out sporadically. India currently possesses neither the domestic military capabilities (what scholars of international security refer to as “internal balancing”) nor the foreign partnerships (“external balancing”) to guarantee its security interests and protect its northern borders from the Chinese incursions that have been accelerating since 2019.

Some within India’s security establishment continue to believe that Russia may yet serve as a possible bulwark against China. These expectations stem from the Soviet Union’s role during the Cold War and India’s continuing dependence on Russia for defense equipment and spare parts. Recent developments, however, suggest that this hope is rather fanciful. Russia, preoccupied with its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, has already failed to deliver some military supplies that it had contracted to provide India. And New Delhi’s assiduously cultivated neutral position on the invasion has not prevented Moscow from turning to Beijing, India’s long-term competitor and adversary. Russia has grown only closer to and more dependent on China since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. It simply cannot play the role India wants it to in checking China.  

THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN

If India cannot rely on Russia to serve as a counterweight to China, might it be able to turn to other emerging and middle powers? India has strong relationships with several countries in Europe, but these countries don’t have the diplomatic, economic, or military clout to guarantee India’s security interests. India cannot count on European countries or the European Union writ large to assist it in containing China. And its ties with other Asian powers, including Iran and Japan, are of limited or no use in the context of its competition with China. Likewise, other emerging powers, such as Argentina and Brazil, are unlikely to choose India over China in the coming years. Bluntly stated, India’s external balancing options—beyond support from the United States—are quite limited.

India’s much-vaunted commitment to maintaining its neutrality is no longer a viable option. This approach poorly serves India’s interests in fending off the political and economic advance of China in South Asia and the broader region. Without a reliable external partner that can help India by sharing intelligence, shoring up its grossly inadequate defense capabilities, and cooperating with it in other security areas, New Delhi will remain woefully exposed to Beijing’s machinations.

Playing to all sides will not guarantee India’s strategic autonomy.

The United States is and will remain the only global power capable of playing this role. It has a compelling interest in keeping China, its principal challenger and rival, at bay. To that end, its interests clearly dovetail with those of India. Across recent administrations, Washington has made repeated efforts to persuade India that these overlapping interests make it an almost ideal security partner in Asia. In 2016, the Obama administration declared India to be a “major defense partner,” thereby better enabling defense sales. During Donald Trump’s presidency, New Delhi and Washington signed the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement, further strengthening bilateral military cooperation. And under President Joe Biden, the two parties have agreed on the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, which will promote cooperation in high-technology areas. But what New Delhi urgently needs to realize is that there is a narrow window to secure American support. As the political scientist Ashley Tellis makes clear in his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the United States cannot possibly afford to expend both domestic capital and critical diplomatic resources to continue to meet India’s needs without some form of tangible reciprocity from New Delhi. By limiting its engagement with the United States—while also pursuing deals with U.S. adversaries such as Russia—India is fundamentally compromising its long-term strategic autonomy rather than guaranteeing it.

Equivocal Indian responses to the United States will, almost invariably, lead Washington to simply bolster security ties with other partners and allies, such as Australia and Japan. India, although strategically significant, cannot continue to sit on the fence; to ensure peace and stability in Asia, it has to throw in its lot with the United States. Indian vacillation will convince U.S. officials that despite their best efforts, New Delhi is either incapable of mustering the requisite political will to build a long-term security partnership with Washington or reluctant to do so.

PROPITIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES

There is no doubt that both sides have in the past missed vital opportunities to transform the relationship. The exigencies of domestic politics, the imperatives of the Cold War, and fundamentally different policy orientations in both capitals prevented them from forging a strong, enduring partnership. Despite these errors, current circumstances are perhaps the most propitious for the future of the bilateral relationship. New Delhi, now more than ever, needs to shed its hesitation about adopting a pragmatic and forward-looking approach in its dealings with the United States.

The benefits that could accrue to both sides from a strong partnership are considerable. India could build up its domestic defense industrial base, access the most sophisticated defense technologies, and gradually reduce its dependence on Russia, an increasingly unreliable defense supplier. Most important, closer defense and security ties with the United States would enable it to ward off the inexorable threat from China.

A closer security partnership could also have significant spillover effects in other arenas. A secure, stable, and confident India would become a more attractive destination for American investment. At a time when the United States is increasingly concerned about the viability of important supply chains, India could become an important manufacturing hub for a variety of components in various industrial products. The United States, in turn, would be able to count on India as a bulwark against China’s growing assertiveness across Asia. Furthermore, Washington could be in a better position to eventually elicit and count on Indian diplomatic support on fraught issues such as the future of Taiwan.

Over the last few decades, several U.S. administrations have prioritized the relationship with India despite considerable diffidence on the part of New Delhi. Instead of remaining content with incremental and fitful improvements in the bilateral relationship, New Delhi must trust Washington and move forward in constructing a multifaceted partnership that fosters peace and stability in Asia.