First, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a New Delhi think tank on 6 June that India is a ‘linchpin’ in America’s re-engagement with Asia. He also promised India access to significant military technologies. Following that meeting, Panetta bypassed Islamabad and warned from Kabul that the US is ‘losing patience’ with Pakistan.
Meanwhile, on the sidelines at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in Beijing, Chinese vice premier Li Keqiang — widely expected to be China’s next premier — told Indian foreign minister S.M. Krishna that Sino–Indian ties would be the most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century. Krishna was reported to have made a strong pitch for India’s full membership in the resource-rich SCO in return.
This competitive wooing of India is occurring against a backdrop of growing rivalry (albeit still contained) between China and the US, which is itself taking place in the context of Washington’s move to re-focus on the Asia Pacific. It should also be considered in the context of confident assertions from New Delhi of India’s supposed policy of ‘strategic independence’ — for example in the recent document NonAlignment 2.0.
New Delhi’s aim is to act as it always has: to play both ends against the middle. Despite India’s ‘tilt’ to the Soviet Union during the Cold War and its current ‘tilt’ to the US, this philosophy has been at the core of Indian strategy for many years. The strategy enables India to retain its swing-state status and also to garner support from both sides of the strategic equation.
This currently involves drawing high-tech military and non-military support from the US, gaining military platforms from Russia, and conducting joint action with China in global fora, such as those on trade and climate change — all sensible strategies for a large, but still emerging country like India.
But will it continue to work?
India is emerging as a power at a time of fundamental shift in Indo-Pacific security. China is rising rapidly to power and the US and Europe are apparently stalling. The AfPak ‘end game’ is highly uncertain and the China-sponsored SCO is asserting a role in the recovery and reconstruction of Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Islamabad has been jockeying for influence in the processes of the end game by asserting its crucial role as the most viable entrepôt for Afghanistan. Last November Pakistan closed the land routes into Afghanistan and has since been driving a hard bargain to have them reopened. The government is also restrained by the fact that any move to reopen the border would be politically unpopular. The Jamaat-ud-Dawa (which is a front for and political arm of the Lashkar-e-Toiba) and other militant groups have been demonstrating against the reopening of the border.
Washington has given a powerful indication it intends to ride out the Pakistani lockout by developing the ‘Northern Route’ through the Central Asian republics and Russia. With the draw-down now the major issue, rather than continuing supply, NATO may just be able to manage using the Northern Route. Or the US may be bluffing in the hope that Islamabad may still open the Pakistan border. Both interpretations probably have an element of truth.
Aside from all of this, Washington’s underlying signal to New Delhi could not be clearer: you are the future in the Indo-Pacific, not Pakistan. In this, the US is clearly aiming to unsettle China’s rise to power and protect its own role as ‘gatekeeper’ of the strategically vital Indian Ocean.
But while the basic message is clear, the details are not. For example, Panetta also appeared to give an ever-so-gentle rebuke to New Delhi over the unconscionable quibbling and delays with defence contracts and reaching a viable (from Washington’s viewpoint) nuclear compensation agreement. This is in keeping with growing US concern that India, with stalled economic growth, significant governance problems and a paralysed parliament, may not prove to be the powerful ballast against China it had originally hoped.
In the final analysis, it may not be wholly up to New Delhi to decide whether to stick to its present policy of ‘strategic independence’ or whether to increase the current strategic ‘tilt’ to the US. As much as New Delhi would prefer to see its own policies driving the agenda, that decision is likely to depend more on external factors than any Indian predilection.
And these external factors will be: how rapidly China rises to power, including vis-à-vis India and the US; and how it chooses to rise to power and to assert its interests, especially in regard to India’s own core interests, which are the border, South Asia and the Indian Ocean. These questions can only currently be, in Churchill’s famous words, ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’.
Sandy Gordon is Visiting Fellow at RegNet, College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University.
This article was first published here on South Asia Masala.
The basic message and the details are clear that the U.S. foreign policy aims to join forces – between China, India and the U.S. – to provide international stability for the 21st century.
For example, an Indian career diplomat to China and to the U.S (currently teaching courses in the Politics of Contemporary India and of Contemporary China as well as India’s Foreign Policy at New York Stony Brook University) Harsh Bhasin explains in his book (2009) titled ‘The Big Three: The Emerging Relationship between the U.S., India and China in the Changing World Order,’ that the three countries aim to work together to provide stability for the 21st century.
Also, Amitai Etzioni, who served as a senior advisor to the Carter White House. taught at Columbia University, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley and is a university professor and professor of international relations at the George Washington University, explains in his article in The National Interest titled ‘Obama’s Asia Bluff’ that Obama’s much-touted pivot to Asia is ‘less due to Obama’s grand change in strategy than meets the eye.’ Etzioni points to the fact that ‘pivot to Asia’ makes sense as one part of an election-year campaign, designed to deprive the GOP claim that Democrats are weak on foreign policy. The more American voters concentrate on the Far East – in which no war looms – the more they will be distracted from the shambles in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Etzioni provides an example that thus far only 250 new marines are added to the 55,442 troops already stationed in the Asia Pacific region. And that these marines are located 2,600 miles away from China reveals that they are not meant to serve as a tripwire on the beaches of Taiwan or at the island chains in the South China Sea. With an increasingly modernized Chinese army consisting of 2,285,000 active troops, Etzioni explains that ‘both Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski strongly favoured heightened U.S. attempts to engage China as a partner in maintaining global order and urged ‘co-evolution’ with China rather than attempts to contain it.’
Neither the U.S. nor China and India seek a military confrontation with each other; it is not in their national interests.
India’s no-tilt non-aligned policy of seeking strategic independence is quite logical no-brainer, if one learns from history.
1. China is a big emerging power and a neighbour with which India has border disputes, and a looming competition in commerce and resources, that also has a military dimension.
2. With the US, India has a history of over three decades of estrangement, sanctions and nuclear aparthied. The US have consistantly assisted Pakistan diplomatically, economically and militarily to neutralize India. The policy continues till date, albeit with a sugar coat.
Although the US have launched a serious effors to rope in India into a strategic embrace, this will remain a dream without a radical change in the US policies towards Pakistan. Simply expecting India to take its eyes off Pakistan and focus on Asia-Pacific, is perceives as an age old Anglo-American ploy, which is not going to work.
The author is right in her observation that the “basic message” is there, but there is lack of “details” about US strategy towards Asia.
Clearly, the US have more in common with India than China. India’s strategy is to build up its own capabilities, as it realizes that it has no option but to fight its own war in the future. And more importantly, India will fight its own war, not one that is imposed by the Anglo-Americans.
The author of this post only mentions Panetta and Pakistan in passing, but it may be worth reflecting a moment on Panetta’s tactic. How long indeed it seems since Gary Powers set off on 5 May from a base near Peshawar, Pakistan, in the pre-drone year of 1960, on his fateful U-2 spy flight over the Soviet Union before being shot down. This sensational incident prompted Khrushchev not only famously to shoe-hammer his table at the UN but also to threaten to attack the base from which such flights took off. The Soviet Premier thereby made some Pakistanis more aware of the danger of embracing the United States too firmly. Not quite so long ago as that, Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan facilitated Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing, thereby allowing him and Nixon eventually to pull off one of the diplomatic masterstrokes of the whole postwar era. Now comes along Kissinger’s distant successor,a somewhat less urbane and less savvy figure even than his immediate predecessor, Robert Gates, let alone Kissinger. What can Panetta have achieved by his appeal in New Delhi for India to be more active in Afghanistan, then his snubbing of Pakistan, and finally his using Kabul as a dais from which to criticise Pakistan beyond confirming Pakistanis’ fears that they face adversaries both to the East and West and that they should continue to back their own horses in Afghanistan, no matter how often America complains? Presumably, by refusing to apologise for the killing of twenty-four Pakistani soldiers last year, the Obama administration has alienated important segments of the Pakistani army. That Zardari refused to buckle at the Nato summit in Chicago last month suggests how much Pakistani public opinion must be against opening the supply route to Afghanistan without an apology. Now the Chief Justice of this turbulent country has brought about Prime Minister Gilani’s downfall. What a relief it must have been for Panetta to find himself in orderly and stable Saudi Arabia a few days ago, tasked to convey the Obama administration’s sincere condolences over the passing of Prince Nayef, a genuine friend of the United States.
What is so masterly about Kassinger’s China diplomacy …. ? Has it not resulted in an even more formidable adversary in China, which, unlike the Soviets, sits on a few trillion dollars of Forex reserves and not going to go away in the foreseeable future …. ?
Further, is it not an example of blatant hypocrisy of the western world that, instead of declaring Kissinger a war criminal, decorates him with a Nobel Peace prize ….. !