Plenty of skeptics in the West believe that US efforts to cement ties with India will disappoint, not least because of India’s longstanding policy of non-alignment. But the US and India are united by shared strategic interests, beginning with the maintenance of a rules-based Indo-Pacific free of coercion.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

No bilateral relationship has deepened and strengthened more rapidly over the last two decades than the one between the United States and India. In fact, Narendra Modi’s upcoming visit to the US will be his eighth as India’s prime minister, and his second since US President Joe Biden took office. The US has at least as much to gain from the growing closeness as India does.

India just overtook China in population size, and although its economy remains smaller, it is growing faster. In fact, India is now the world’s fastest-growing major economy, with GDP having already surpassed that of the United Kingdom and on track to overtake that of Germany. India thus represents a major export market for the US, including for weapons.

But commercial opportunities are just the beginning. In an era of sharpening geopolitical competition, the US is seeking partners to help it counter the growing influence – and assertiveness – of China (and its increasingly close ally Russia). India is an obvious partner for its fellow democracies in the West, though what it really represents is a critical “swing state” in the struggle to shape the future of the Indo-Pacific and the world order more broadly. The US cannot afford for it to swing toward the emerging Russia-China alliance.

Consider America’s quest to bolster supply-chain resilience through so-called friend-shoring. As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has explained, India is among the “trusted trading partners” with which the US is “proactively deepening economic integration,” as it attempts to diversify its trade “away from countries that present geopolitical and security risks” to its supply chain.

India is also integral to maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Its military standoff with China – now entering its 38th month – is a case in point. By refusing to back down, India is openly challenging Chinese expansionism, while making it more difficult for China to make a move on Taiwan. Biden has not commented on the confrontation, but he is certainly paying attention. It is telling that both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan visited New Delhi this month.

Already, India holds more military exercises with the US than any other power, and as of 2020, it had signed all four of the “foundational” agreements that the US maintains with all its allies. This means that the two countries, among other things, provide reciprocal access to each other’s military facilities and share geospatial data from airborne and satellite sensors. Meanwhile, India’s involvement in the Quad – along with the US, Australia, and Japan – has lent the grouping much-needed strategic heft.

Fortifying the strategic relationship with India is one of the rare issues eliciting bipartisan consensus in the US. The latest invitation to Modi to address the US Congress – he is the first Indian leader to do so twice – came from Democratic and Republican leaders alike.

Nonetheless, plenty of skeptics in the West believe that US efforts to cement strategic ties with India will disappoint. For example, one commentator recently declared that India will never be an ally of the US, and another argued that treating India as a key partner will not help the US in its geopolitical competition with China.

A key concern is India’s commitment to retaining its strategic independence. While India has rarely mentioned non-alignment since Modi came to power, in practice, it has been multi-aligned. As it has deepened its partnerships with democratic powers, it has also maintained its traditionally close relationship with Russia.

But India’s relationships with the US and Russia seem to be moving in opposite directions. India is building a broad and multifaceted partnership with the US – covering everything from cooperation on human spaceflight to the construction of resilient semiconductor supply chains – whereas its relationship with Russia now seems limited almost exclusively to defense and energy.

Nonetheless, India is not prepared to shun Russia, as the West has since the invasion of Ukraine, not least because India still views Russia as a valuable counterweight to China. In India’s view, China and Russia are not natural allies at all, but natural competitors that have been forced together by US policy. A Sino-Russian strategic axis serves neither India’s nor America’s interests, yet, much to India’s frustration, the US appears to have little interest in rethinking its policy.

This is not the only area where India believes that US policy undermines Indian security interests. India also takes issue with America’s insistence on maintaining severe sanctions on Myanmar and Iran, while coddling Pakistan, where mass arrests, disappearances, and torture have become the norm. The US is now threatening visa sanctions against officials of Bangladesh’s secular government – which is locked in a battle against Islamist forces – if it believes they are undermining elections that are due early next year.

The US is not accustomed to being challenged by its partners. Its traditional, Cold War-style alliances position the US as the “hub” and its allies as the “spokes.” But this will never work with India. As the White House’s Asia policy czar, Kurt Campbell, has acknowledged, “India has a unique strategic character,” and “a desire to be an independent, powerful state.” Far from a US client, India “will be another great power.”

Campbell is right. But that does not mean that the skeptics are also right. While a traditional treaty-based alliance with India would not work, the kind of soft alliance the US is pursuing, which requires no pact but does include, as Campbell also underlined, “people-to-people ties” and cooperation on “technology and the like,” can benefit both sides.

The US and India are united by shared strategic interests, not least in maintaining a rules-based Indo-Pacific free of coercion. As long as China remains on its current course, so will the Indo-American relationship.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

© Project Syndicate, 2023.

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the foundations of the international order, a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would lead to a profound global geopolitical reordering — including ending America’s global preeminence. The longer the Ukraine war continues to distract the United States from the growing challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, the greater the risk of a Chinese attempt to throttle Taiwan through an informal blockade.

It is clear that the single greatest threat to American security is posed not by a declining Russia but by an ascendant China that is seeking to supplant the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power. Still, President Biden rightly emphasizes the importance of talks with Beijing, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calling dialogue “not a reward” but “a necessity” after his Chinese counterpart declined to hold a meeting with him on the sidelines of the Asia Security Summit in Singapore.

Oddly, however, the Biden administration shuns dialogue and diplomacy with Russia, thus prolonging a war in Ukraine that, far from advancing America’s long-term interests, is a drain on U.S. resources. The war is revealing Western military shortcomings, with America’s critical munitions being depleted and capacity to restock proving insufficient. 

The last thing Chinese President Xi Jinping wants is an end to the Ukraine war, because that would leave the U.S. free to focus on the Indo-Pacific. 

Biden’s strategy is to continue bleeding Russia in Ukraine. In fact, Biden’s joint communiqué with the other Group of Seven leaders in Hiroshima, Japan, May 20 committed to “increasing the costs to Russia” while pledging “unwavering support for Ukraine for as long as it takes.” 

In a separate statement on Ukraine issued a day earlier, the G7 leaders announced steps to “further restrict Russia’s access to our economies” and tighten the unprecedented sanctions against Moscow. 

More ominously, Biden and the other six leaders put forth maximalist demands for an end to the war in Ukraine, including that Russia “completely and unconditionally withdraw its troops and military equipment from the entire internationally recognized territory of Ukraine.” But, with the conflict settling into a war of attrition that inhibits either side from making significant battlefield advances, a complete and unconditional Russian withdrawal is unlikely to ever happen. In fact, after formally annexing the vast swaths of Ukrainian territory it has seized, Russia has been fortifying its defenses to hold on to its war gains.

In their joint statement, Biden and the other G7 leaders have also committed to efforts to ensure “Russia pays for the long-term reconstruction of Ukraine.” 

Their statement states that the G7 states “will continue to take measures available within our domestic frameworks to find, restrain, freeze, seize, and, where appropriate, confiscate or forfeit the assets of those individuals and entities that have been sanctioned in connection with Russia’s aggression.” It continues, “We reaffirm that, consistent with our respective legal systems, Russia’s sovereign assets in our jurisdictions will remain immobilized until Russia pays for the damage it has caused to Ukraine.” 

Not only is the unilateral impoundment of Russian assets contrary to a rules-based international order, but the maximalist demands set out by the G7 leaders are a recipe for an unending conflict, which can only benefit China economically and strategically while weakening Russia and sapping Western strength. 

With the age of Western dominance already in retreat, a long war in Ukraine would accelerate the shift in global power from the West to the East. 

Meanwhile, CIA Director Bill Burns’s recent clandestine visit to Beijing exemplifies Biden’s efforts to placate China as he ramps up sanctions and military pressure on Russia. While seeking economic collapse and regime change in Russia, Biden has tried to reassure Xi with what Beijing says are “Five Nos”: No to changing China’s communist system; no to seeking U.S. economic decoupling from China; no to a policy of “one China, one Taiwan”; no to containing China; and no to a new Cold War with China. 

The White House may not have directly corroborated such commitments, but similar formulations can be found in the Biden administration’s public declarations, including an assurance in the administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy that the U.S. “objective is not to change the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” the world’s most populous, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy.

Biden is mistaken if he thinks he can bring around China or dissuade it from ganging up with Russia against America. Xi is determined to make China a world power second to none. Indeed, China and Russia, with important allies like Iran, are in the process of forming a “Eurasian Axis” to challenge the American-led global order, including the status of the dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency. 

Against this backdrop, it would be in America’s interest to encourage quiet diplomacy to explore ways to bring about a ceasefire in a war that is having a negative worldwide impact by triggering energy and food crises, which in turn contribute to high inflation and slowing global growth. Ukraine’s impending launch of its long-planned counteroffensive, meanwhile, promises to heighten the risk of a direct Russia–NATO conflict. 

Even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warns that “a large number of soldiers will die” in his country’s counteroffensive because Russia retains the upper hand in air power, Kyiv, with U.S. backing, continues to reject proposals of peace talks that do not center on Russia first vacating the areas it has occupied.

After more than 15 months of war, it is clear that neither Russia nor Ukraine and its Western allies is in a position to achieve its primary strategic objectives. A ceasefire is the only way out of the current military deadlock. 

In the Korean War, it took two years of military stalemate to achieve an armistice agreement. A similarly long delay in reaching an armistice agreement in the current war would mean greater bloodshed and devastation without either side making any significant strategic gains. 

An extended Ukraine war will help formalize a Sino-Russian strategic axis while increasing the likelihood of Chinese aggression against Taiwan. By contrast, a frozen Ukraine conflict arising from a ceasefire will keep Moscow preoccupied while letting America focus less on Russia, the world’s most-sanctioned country, and more on a globally expansionist China.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).