Foreign Affairs Published An Impressively Insightful Analysis About Indian-US Relations

American decisionmakers arrogantly assumed that their defense exports to India, joint drills with it, and those two’s cooperation through the Quad assured them of Delhi’s reliability as an anti-Chinese proxy state. Instead of paying attention to its explicitly stated goal of strengthening its strategic autonomy, including through the indigenous mastery of defense technologies, they indulged in wishful thinking imagining that India’s expansion of defense ties with the US signaled its intention to become a vassal.

Foreign Affairs is the official magazine of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, which means that it more often than not parrots the US’ political talking points repackaged as analyses. That’s why it was so surprising to see that they just published such an impressively insightful analysis about Indian-US relations titled “America’s Bad Bet on India: New Delhi Won’t Side With Washington Against Beijing”. It was written by Ashley J. Tellis, who’s a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He accurately clarified India’s foreign policy with respect to China and the US, informing the latter’s policymakers that they should immediately dispel the illusion that India will participate in any military conflict with them against the People’s Republic. While it would certainly sympathize with the US in such a scenario, it won’t subordinate its forces to that country’s control under the guise of “interoperability”, nor will it open up a second front across the Himalayas either.

American decisionmakers arrogantly assumed that their defense exports to India, joint drills with it, and those two’s cooperation through the Quad assured them of Delhi’s reliability as an anti-Chinese proxy state. Instead of paying attention to its explicitly stated goal of strengthening its strategic autonomy, including through the indigenous mastery of defense technologies, they indulged in wishful thinking imagining that India’s expansion of defense ties with the US signaled its intention to become a vassal.

Tellis also told his influential audience that it’s a fallacy for them to believe that India shares the same vision of the international order as the US does. While he didn’t delve too deeply into this aspect of its grand strategy, External Affairs Minister Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar extensively elaborated on his country’s worldview in an interview with an Austrian magazine at the start of the year. He defended India’s objective national interests with respect to Russia in the face of Western pressure upon them.

Its pragmatic policy of principled neutrality towards the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine has already reaped grand strategic dividends that collectively accelerated its rise as a globally significant Great Power over the past year. India envisages informally leading the Global South amidst the impending trifurcation of International Relations into that category of countries, the US-led West’s Golden Billion, and the Sino-Russo Entente.

Regarding its relations with those two de facto New Cold War blocs, India aims to adroitly multi-align between both in order to maximize its earlier mentioned strategic autonomy. It’s not the US’ “ally” against China like that first-mentioned’ perception managers maliciously misportray it as for divide-and-rule purposes, which are aided by sympathetic liberal-globalists among the Indian intelligentsia, but nor are relations with China all that great either due to their unresolved border dispute.

Amidst the dilemma of becoming the US’ vassal out of desperation to ensure protection in the scenario of a major conflict with China or turning into the second’s “junior partner” by normalizing relations despite the presence of foreign troops on its soil, India has come to rely on Russia. Moscow helps Delhi maintain its military deterrence vis-à-vis Beijing without having to strategically surrender to Washington while also signaling to the People’s Republic that it shouldn’t use force to settle its dispute with India.

The world order that India is jointly working with Russia and the rest of the Global South to build is one of complex multipolarity (“multiplexity”) wherein the US’ unipolar hegemony comes to an end without its prior influence over Asia being replaced by China. Delhi keenly understands the dynamics of the Sino-Russo Entente well enough to know that Moscow also doesn’t want Beijing to be the dominant player in the continent either, even if it won’t ever say so out loud for obvious diplomatic reasons.

This explains why the Russian-Indian Strategic Partnership unprecedentedly strengthened over the past year despite the similarly unprecedented pressure that was placed upon it by the US. In fact, it was arguably that selfsame pressure which catalyzed this new era in their relations since Delhi felt compelled to build even stronger ties with Moscow in response to Washington trying to force it into vassalage. Without realizing it, the US discredited itself as a reliable partner through this pressure campaign.

Whatever illusions some of Indian decisionmakers might have had about America’s so-called “benign hegemony” were instantly dispelled after its officials and media demanded that Delhi distance itself from Russia, which would have crippled its deterrence capabilities vis-à-vis China. The US won’t (at least not yet) fight China over the latter’s eponymous Southern Sea nor Taiwan so it surely wouldn’t rush to India’s aid if the People’s Republic decided to exploit the situation to impose its preferred view of the border.  

Framed differently, the US was essentially trying to pressure India into a position where it abandons its decades-long military ties with Russia at the expense of its objective national security interests and thus leave it completely vulnerable to China, with only Beijing’s mercy preventing the worst-case scenario. No responsible decisionmaker would take the last-mentioned factor for granted after their lethal clashes over the Galwan River Valley in summer 2020, hence why they rebuffed the US’ suicidal demands.

Returning back to Tellis’ piece after explaining the pivotal role that Russia plays in India’s multi-alignment between America and China, he wisely concluded that “The United States should certainly help India to the degree compatible with American interests. But it should harbor no illusions that its support, no matter how generous, will entice India to join it in any military coalition against China, adding that “The Biden administration should recognize this reality rather than try to alter it.”

It was precisely the Biden Administration’s attempts to alter the reality that was shared in this analysis and in Tellis’ that resulted in Indians concluding that the US is an unreliable ally after it practically wanted to place their country at China’s mercy by forcing it to cut defense ties with Russia. This was one of the worst bets that the US ever made, and it’s impossible to repair the grand strategic damage after its hegemonic demands resulted in unprecedentedly accelerating India’s rise.

That’s not to suggest that the US has anything to fear from this, but just that it dealt a deathblow to whatever unipolar delusions its decisionmakers might still have. There’s no going back to the prior world order where the US called all the shots and forced countries to sacrifice their objective national interests in order to advance its own. The sooner that the US realizes this and begins treating India with the respect that it’s deserved all along, the sooner that their ties can return to being mutually beneficial.