A couple months ago I highlighted Ashley Tellis’ Foreign Affairs article on America’s “bad bet” on India, as well as Laxman Kumar Behera’s take. Back in January 2021, I wrote a wandering post about how it seemed like the Biden administration wanted to have it both ways in Asia (and I suspect more broadly in foreign policy) – doing well while doing good, advancing an anti-Chinese coalition that balanced power while also advancing the cause of democracy and liberalism. I suggested there was a potentially deep tension between aspects of those two goals:
“many of the countries that are looked to as either partners or arenas in which the US/”like-minded partners”* compete against China are not interested in a coalition of techno-democracies against authoritarianism, nor do they necessarily fit in any clean way into a “contest of systems” (in Twining’s words). . . .
countries don’t seem to be either sprinting toward convergence with the liberal democratic models heralded in US strategy writings, nor falling prey to the grim lures of the Bolshevik party-state. Most places are neither China nor Japan . . ..
you can easily imagine cases in which competing with China lands the US in rather normatively unpleasant situations”
I am feeling pretty decent these days about highlighting that tension. Substantively, it seems to have been largely resolved in favor of the balancing-China side of things, but still wrapped in the high-flying rhetorical mantle of the global battle against autocracy. In this vein, Dan Markey’s new Foreign Affairs piece returns to the India question, arguing that:
“To capitalize on these complementary material interests, however, the United States must dispense with the idea that shared values can provide the bedrock of a strong relationship, justifying its high tolerance for New Delhi’s behavior on the basis of a bet on long-term convergence. Rather than considering India an ally in the fight for global democracy, it must see that India is an ally of convenience. This shift will not be easy, given that Washington has spent decades looking at New Delhi through rose-colored glasses. But the pivot will encourage both sides to understand that their relationship is ultimately transactional—and allow them to get down to business. . . .
But Washington needs to cease endorsing Modi’s BJP. It must stop altruistically subsidizing the rise of another illiberal Asian giant.”
I’ve sounded some of these notes before (i.e in 2018 and 2019) so I am sympathetic to aspects the approach, though I don’t agree with all of of Markey’s points (the US, now and historically, is not exactly a model of reliable alignment and steadfast support for human rights and liberalism, and there are some nuances in Indian domestic politics worth noting).
This is where you get into a point I made in 2021:
“If you are worried about human rights and democracy as an integral part of Asia strategy, the challenge then becomes threading the needle in supporting “like-minded partners” without being actively complicit in their domestic projects”
Easier said than done. And especially in an American political/diplomatic culture in which soaring professions of virtue and eternal friendship seem to be totally taken for granted, no matter how utterly vacuous. Validator calls, retweet symphonies, and articles based on “administration sources” are all useless compared to just comparing what is being said to what is going on. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if someone in government just said true things “we don’t care all that much about the liberalism stuff, we want to sell India just a ton of weapons [Paul here: this is something that comes up every time I talk to someone from the US military], get market access for US firms, and work with them on keeping the Chinese from getting too powerful, full stop.”
Arzan Tarapore’s rejoinder to Tellis in Foreign Affairs steers entirely clear of the values stuff and in its own way seems to be broadly compatible with Markey’s when it comes to actual policy recommendations, despite radically different framing. He correctly notes that “India’s cheerleaders in Washington may conjure up unrealistic expectations” and then articulates a clear, quite specific set of areas of cooperation: the Indian Ocean, helping India figure out the best way to manage the border threat, and some degree of diplomatic coordination around particular issues. This sounds quite similar to Markey’s recommendation that the US pursue “cooperation with India must be tightly targeted to countering immediate threats posed by China.” Tarapore’s approach pares away the kind of global democracy frames that the Biden administration has doubled down on (rhetorically) since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and offers a much less ambitious, but much more plausible, set of shared agenda items.
My uncontroversial guess is that the more US-China tensions escalate, the more India will be tightly embraced by Washington. The uncertain thing, though, will be the specific, nitty-gritty terms of the India-US bargain – in a world in which both countries are allies of convenience and India (as it should, in my view) wants to be a key player in a multipolar world, what exactly should the US and India provide each other? It’s not obvious how this specific point will play out in the years to come – the world Markey describes might as well be in a totally different galaxy than what you see folks like Atul Keshap describing and advocating. Which worldview gains power, or whether they engage with each other at all rather than living in parallel universes, will be awfully interesting from a political scientist’s perspective.
Anyways, another tangential post and now I need to go do some actual work.
Paul Staniland 