Many analysts and commentators in both the United States and India have struggled to understand the evolving relationship between the two countries. Consider, for example, widespread Western criticism of India’s reluctance to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, accelerated purchases of Russian oil, and continued reliance on Moscow’s arms. These critics might thus have expected the United States to disengage—but instead are surprised by U.S. President Joe Biden’s turn toward closer relations. Biden insists that the United States is in a “long game” of engagement with India, one that differences over Ukraine will not be allowed to undermine. Despite India’s ties to Moscow—or rather, because of them—the Biden administration is also going out of its way to help India modernize its defense industry, agreeing to transfer to India one of the U.S. defense sector’s crown jewels: the technology to manufacture fighter jet engines.
Another reason for the dissonance between public discourse and official policy are the distorting ideological prisms through which U.S. and Indian opinion-makers often view the relationship. Even today, much of the Indian strategic community can’t get past the old shibboleths of nonalignment—the idea, born in the Cold War, that India is best served by maximum distance from the United States. Among Western commentators, in turn, a focus on democratic values obfuscates the inexorable strategic logic driving Washington and New Delhi into each other’s arms. Together, the two countries’ public debates about each other generate a noise that drowns out the signals on changing Indo-U.S. relations.
All this confusion is on display this week, as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives to Washington for a summit meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday. As officials in the two capitals talk of Modi’s visit as a “milestone” in bilateral relations that will “consecrate” the U.S.-India strategic partnership, observers of the relationship are struggling once again. Modi’s Western critics wonder why Biden is hosting the Indian leader with such enthusiasm. After all, the Biden administration’s framing of geopolitics as a contest between democracy and autocracy implies opposition to what the critics consider Modi’s democratic backsliding. And in India, an old elite nostalgic for the era of nonalignment are once again surprised at Modi’s pursuit of close relations.
The problem is a reluctance to correctly read the trends driving the United States and India into a strategic embrace. The main source of their convergence is by now familiar: Both nations feel challenged by China. After much hesitation and reluctance over the last two decades, the United States has finally come around to the clear proposition that China represents a persistent, long-term threat to U.S. interests. The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy affirmed that not even Russia’s war in Ukraine alters this strategic priority.
Washington’s and New Delhi’s new foreign-policy realism is likely to produce more surprises in the days ahead.
The United States has been drifting in this direction for quite some time. If Sino-U.S. bonhomie peaked in 2000 with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit to Beijing, his successors have all sought to recalibrate assumptions about Beijing’s benign rise. George W. Bush began his time in office with clear recognition of the need to counter China in Asia but was distracted by the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama took the shift a step further, outlining a security “pivot to Asia,” but the presumed need to cooperate with China on economic and climate issues limited its implementation. Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy outlined the centrality of the Chinese challenge. Biden, in turn, doubled down on the China threat and articulated a more systematic U.S. response.
All presidents since Clinton signaled a strong desire for deeper strategic ties to India as part of the effort to restructure U.S. foreign and security policy toward Asia. Modi’s state visit to Washington this week is just the latest step in steadily growing U.S.-India relations, a process that has accelerated under Biden.
India, too, has zeroed in on China as its most important strategic challenge in the 21st century. Four significant military crises along the two countries’ common border in the Himalayas—in 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2020—have underlined the threat to New Delhi, as have Chinese policies that challenge India’s primacy in the subcontinent, Indian Ocean interests, and global aspirations.
Handwringing in the Indian political class prevented New Delhi from seizing the new opportunities with Washington under Bush, but Modi has now stepped forward to build a substantive strategic partnership. Put simply, the imperatives of a stronger U.S.-India partnership have been evident for more than two decades. The delay on the Indian side was about sorting out lingering suspicions about the United States. Today, Modi says there is “unprecedented trust” between the two nations’ leaders.
What has prevented analyst communities in both countries from fully recognizing the new direction in bilateral relations is the ideological discourse on foreign policy in each country: democracy and nonalignment, in the United States and India respectively.
The Western liberal critique of Modi’s domestic policies has tended to obfuscate the deepening structural convergence on China. The focus on global democracy promotion in official U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War never meant the United States would forego the pursuit of its many other interests. The hope of some—in both the United States and India—that the United States would somehow step in to save Indian democracy from itself was fanciful. Equally irrelevant were the fears of those in India—on both the left and right—who see U.S. conspiracies to meddle in India’s affairs everywhere.
The proposition that the United States, which can’t even manage to help next-door Haiti fix its democracy problems, can do something about democracy in faraway India was always an illusion. The battle to uphold democratic values in India is a political task for Indians and can’t be fought by liberals from abroad. What’s more, if Washington can do business for many decades with the House of Saud, the Pakistan Army, and the Chinese Communist Party, it is unreasonable to think it will be squeamish about building on clearly convergent interests with the Modi government.
Equally overdetermined is the role of nonalignment ideology in driving India’s foreign policy. After all, even in the depths of the Cold War, then-Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru turned to the United States for military support when China attacked in 1962. In Tibet in the 1950s, Nehru’s intelligence establishment collaborated with the CIA. Nehru’s successor, Indira Gandhi, only signed a security treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971, when she feared the implications of Sino-U.S. convergence in Asia initiated by the Nixon administration.
To be sure, democracy and nonalignment are part of the long-standing foreign-policy ideologies of the United States and India, and they are likely to remain an important part of each country’s domestic discourse. But neither ideology can be an end itself.
Washington has not allowed democratic values to come in the way of pursuing its security interests—the basis, one could argue, on which American democracy exists. The same holds for the Indian tradition of nonalignment: There is nothing to suggest that New Delhi is immune to the logic of dealing with the threats it confronts and the interests it must secure. Unlike his recent predecessors, Modi has the confidence to override lingering domestic skepticism and engage the United States for national benefit.
If the enormity of the China challenge to both countries has provided the structural impetus, strong political will in Washington and New Delhi is set to finalize a solid agenda. This ranges from defense and semiconductors to artificial intelligence and outer space. The new foreign-policy realism in Washington and New Delhi is thus very likely to produce some more surprises in the days ahead.
