Washington DC nowadays is a focused town. In the grip of a single-mindedness not seen since Sputnik and McCarthy, all policy, including domestic, economic, foreign, and of course, defence, is viewed solely through the China lens: how does it help us contain China?
On June 21, the prime minister of India will arrive and will have to finally answer the question that the Americans have been asking and that his government has been dodging since Russia invaded Ukraine: “Are you with us or against us?” His choice will define India, Asia, and perhaps his own political fortunes in the years to come.
Ten years ago, Modi’s rise was supported by the United States, in part because he was good for the multinational corporations and Wall Street: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Boeing, GE, JPM and Steve Schwartzman have all bet on India these past few years. The role India played in the US imagination then was as an economic counterweight to China, a budding growth market that would replicate the rates of growth American companies had relished in China. Modi, as a business-friendly politician, offered the means of realising this. To some extent, he has delivered.
But recently, as the US has come to realise the scale and scope of the Chinese challenge to its hegemony, the US perception of the role of India on the global chessboard has changed, as has the global chessboard itself.
First, the US has woken up to the fact that China’s vision for the world challenges US assumptions about its own pre-eminence and exceptionalism. China is rapidly erecting an alternative set of rules and standards in trade, infrastructure, money lending, telecoms, AI, and crucially, upending the US dollar as the global trading currency. China also controls critical value chains of the future, including green energy and electric vehicles, and has surpassed the West in innovation and patents in critical technology areas such as quantum computing.
At the same time, the world’s dependence on China continues to grow. Indeed, the initial hope that Western multinationals could help build India into a formidable new China proved to be naive. Many assumptions have been shattered along the way: China will not collapse if the US decouples from it, China’s economy is not critically dependent on the MNCs, China’s momentum is now home-grown and looks unstoppable; India is not China, India will not grow as fast, as well, or as efficiently, and will not provide a replacement for China, either as a manufacturing hub or as a market, any time soon.
Second, the US under President Biden appears intent on falling deep into the Thucydides trap. Statements by members of the DC establishment suggest that the US has come to believe that the only way to preserve its hegemony is to arrest China’s rise. A military showdown seems increasingly likely.
This new mission means that the global chessboard today is no longer unipolar. It is a Cold War chessboard in which great powers stare each other down. The “economic replacement for China” role of India takes a backseat in this new game. India is now very much part of the China containment strategy. In this new role, India offers some unique characteristics: it is a potential second front (after Taiwan in the east), a means of distracting China’s military as the principal battles are waged on China’s populous eastern seaboard, forcing it to fight on two distant fronts at the same time. India is the only country with more than a million men under arms, other than China itself. And crucially, India has a long and unsettled border with China that remains a powder keg.
So, India would seem to be the ideal regional ally in any strategy to contain China. The US faces one problem, though. India hasn’t seemed eager to play that role, not even under Modi, a prime minister who has taken the country militarily closer to the US than any of his predecessors. Modi has turned a blind eye to persistent flare-ups at the border with China, perhaps due to domestic calculations that acknowledging the recent Chinese ingress makes him look weak. On Ukraine too, India has struck a maverick pose on the global stage since the start of the NATO-Russia conflict. New Delhi is in the Quad, whose exertions both Beijing and Moscow frown upon, but was not included in AUKUS which is the maritime spearhead with which the US is prodding China in the east.
Ashley Tellis has argued that the US is making a ‘bad bet’ on India and that “New Delhi won’t side with Washington against Beijing”. However, one of the reasons Biden will fete Modi in a couple of weeks is because he wants India to be that second front, willing and able to offer up a million men as a bulwark and an irritant to China. He will assure the Indian side that this will not expose them to a two-front war, as Pakistan will be held on a tight US leash.
He will promise logistical and intelligence support, and he will tell Modi that China will be too busy on its eastern front to fight a proper, well-supplied war on its western front. Modi will be nudged to visualise a rematch of the India-China 1962 war, but this time with the West completely on India’s side, and with the BJP leader, unlike Nehru, coming out victorious, possibly reclaiming territory India says it has lost to Chinese claims over the years.
Modi’s dilemma is that anything but a clear-cut “We’re with you and against China” is unlikely to go down well in the current atmosphere in DC. Other leaders confronted with the same choice have tended to wobble in the face of American carrots and sticks. Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea agreed to allow US nuclear submarines to dock in Korea for the first time in 40 years; Anthony Albanese of Australia agreed to pay $368 billion for the privilege of participating in AUKUS and hosting the alliance’s nuclear submarines (changing Australia’s longstanding no-nukes stance); and Bongbong Marcos of the Philippines agreed to host four new US military bases. Leaders in the region who have declined to choose also offer a lesson: witness the recent US sanctions on Bangladesh, and the fate of Imran Khan.
With Modi’s state visit less than a fortnight away, the advance negotiations and decisions are already set. US defence secretary Lloyd Austin was in India a couple of weeks ago to offer joint arms manufacturing and defence technology transfer. National security adviser Jake Sullivan is now in Delhi to push matters further.
What India decides may determine whether and how soon the mounting militarisation of Asia turns to war. Does Modi have a choice? Yes. The country has long prided itself on its independent foreign policy, captured in the semi-official tagline “engagement with all, exclusivity with none”. Since the end of the Cold War, New Delhi has insisted on a “multi-polar” world that presumes India is one of the poles. The natural outcome of this long-standing position must be a rejection of the Manichean choice being offered by DC.
Logically, and to prevent being caught up in the unfolding great power games, this alternative choice will inevitably involve an entente with China over the border and a more cordial relationship between the world’s two most populous nations. This choice may even delay America’s plans, and possibly buy Asia, and especially India, a measure of peace. But at the price of western support. That is the price of being an independent pole in a multipolar world.
Source : The Wire
