The Wall Street Journal Is Right: India Nowadays Doubts America’s Reliability
The only way to restore this lost trust is for the US to comprehensively recalibrate its grand strategy, but the Biden Administration either doesn’t realize this imperative or is unwilling to do what’s needed.
The Wall Street Journal published a piece from opinion columnist Walter Russell Mead last week about how “India’s Elite Worries About America: Leaders in Delhi wonder if the U.S. is up to keeping the global system intact” based on his experiences at the recent Global Business Summit in that country. The gist is that the US might be unable to retain the world order that it built after World War II and the end of the Old Cold War, which is resulting in a panoply of strategic challenges for India.
The examples mentioned are the Red Sea Crisis, Russia turning closer to China in response to Western sanctions, and the People’s Republic expanding its global influence. What they all have in common are controversial policy choices by the Biden Administration that altogether enable astute observers to discern a clear pattern. Diehard support of Israel, equally intense hatred of Russia, and a blind eye of sorts to China are proof of ideological radicalism and misguided pragmatism.
To explain, the pro-Israeli and anti-Russian lobbies are responsible for convincing policymakers to implement radical policies towards those two in pursuit of ideological goals, which are Zionism and Russophobia thinly disguised as alleged “defenses of the rules-based order”. As for the misguided pragmatism towards China, their incipient thaw is noble in principle, but American policymakers appear to not have a clear vision of how to take it forward and are thus being led by the nose by Beijing.
After all, the US’ grand strategic interests as the permanent members of its military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies have consistently conceptualized them as being rest in retaining their unipolar hegemony, which only has a chance of succeeding through comprehensive competition with China. Instead of prioritizing that first and foremost, the earlier mentioned lobbyists have diverted the country’s focus, which created strategic openings for China to accelerate the expansion of its global influence.
With the US’ reputation in shambles across the Global South due to its refusal to do anything meaningful to stop Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians and its military-industrial complex running on fumes after sending the bulk of its stockpiles to Ukraine, it’s no wonder that China feels more confident than ever. This outcome isn’t just detrimental to the US’ interests as its elite conceptualize them as being, but also to India’s objective national ones as well.
From that South Asian civilization-state’s perspective, their unresolved border disputes with China are perennially at risk of exploding into an all-out war by miscalculation, hence the need to manage them very carefully. One of the fears that Indian policymakers have is that the noticeable decline in American leadership across the world brought about by the three examples that were earlier explained could embolden China into unilaterally trying to resolve these aforesaid disputes by force in its favor.
Making matters even worse is that Indo-US ties have been rocked since the Justice Department filed charges against an unnamed Indian official in late November who it accused of conspiring to assassinate a Delhi-designated terrorist-separatist with dual American citizenship on US soil last summer. This coincided with the incipient Sino-US thaw and further reinforced the perception among some Indian policymakers that America might not support them against China if their border dispute exploded again.
Although Russia is arming India to the teeth as part of its own Sino-Indo balancing act and is indisputably that country’s most reliable partner in history, it’s unrealistic to expect the Kremlin to deter Beijing from unilaterally trying to resolve the Sino-Indo border dispute by force or to punish it if that happens. Only the US can play that role because it isn’t balancing China but is trying to contain it even though its commitment to this cause has become questionable in recent months from India’s perspective.
Economic ties remain mutually beneficial, but the strategic factor that brought India and the US together over the decades has begun to weaken for objective reasons related to its noticeably declining global leadership and subjective ones pertaining to suspicions about it cutting a secret deal with China. The only way to restore this lost trust is for the US to comprehensively recalibrate its grand strategy, but the Biden Administration either doesn’t realize this imperative or is unwilling to do what’s needed.
In the event that his team has a strategic epiphany, then the best-case scenario from India’s perspective would be for the US to pursue a more balanced policy towards West Asia, relieve pressure on Russia as part of a phased end to the proxy war, and return to more muscularly containing China. While the last two parts could happen if Trump returns to power next year, it might be too late by then to repair the damage to Indo-US ties, hence the need for America to act now if it really cares about this relationship.