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.
