The angst of wayward US partnerships
By M K Bhadrakumar
As the crow flies, just over a kilometer separates the White House from Foggy
Bottom, the home of the United States Department of State, but the travel
distance is longer. At any rate, the drive President Barack Obama took last
Wednesday from the heart of Washington to the border with Virginia was a rare
one.
Obama broke protocol by attending a reception hosted by Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton in honor of her visiting Indian
counterpart, S M Krishna, who co-chaired the inaugural United States-India
strategic dialogue.
With his personal interjection into the US-India relationship, Obama signaled
that India remains a top priority in his foreign policy agenda. There should be
no ambiguity on this score. International diplomacy is replete with symbolism
and this is doubly so at a time of great volatility in the international
system.
Thus, coming a week after the US's strategic dialogue with China and a couple
of action-packed months after the US-Pakistan dialogue, comparisons are bound
to be drawn. China's People's Daily hastened to react, "The intensity of
US-China traffic is in sharp contrast with the lack of high-level exchanges
between the Indian leadership and Obama."
Yet, Obama asserted that one third of his cabinet officials had already visited
Delhi and he himself would travel to the Indian capital in November.
The Chinese angst surfaced when the daily added, "US officials have repeatedly
sought to reassure India that the bilateral relationship remains on a fast
track under the Obama administration and that it will not pursue close contacts
with China at the expense of strong ties with India."
Beijing is closely watching the "latest US move to affirm the importance of the
South Asian country" and the indication that "Obama administration has
identified India as a major strategic partner in the new international order".
It comes at a time when Obama is choreographing a reset of US-Russia ties.
Besides, China's northeast diplomacy has lately run into headwinds, as the
impasse over the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan -
seemingly by North Korea - highlighted.
Most certainly, compared to his last visit to Japan in 2008, Premier Wen Jiabao
was far less exuberant during talks in Tokyo on May 31 about the China-Japan
relationship and his discussions were noticeably subdued as regards how China
and Japan might shape their future. Indeed, Beijing has reason to be
apprehensive.
How far is Beijing's angst warranted? If rhetoric can take wings, the United
States-India relationship is all set to fly high into a clear blue sky where
the sun shines eternal. Seldom has such high-flown rhetoric resonated the
corridors of power in Washington: simply put, the Obama administration is
apparently convinced that the US has no future in the 21st century without
India's partnership. The rhetoric by far exceeded what it was supposed to serve
- to calm Delhi's nerves regarding Obama's perceived lack of commitment to the
US-India partnership.
Instead it virtually resuscitated the George W Bush-era paradigm that
Washington, in its self-interest, is determined to make India a first-rate
global power.
But life is real. And Krishna probably did the right thing to plant his feet
firmly on the ground. On balance, the US-India strategic dialogue did not
produce any "deliverables" for New Delhi. The heart of the matter is that the
Obama administration is not in a position to annoy Pakistan.
Senior US officials not only took care to sequester Pakistan from censuring as
a state sponsoring terrorism but instead viewed Pakistan with sympathy - as,
like India, a victim - rather than as a perpetrator of terrorism in the region,
as Delhi alleges.
Equally, they underscored the centrality of Islamabad's cooperation for
reaching an Afghan settlement. US officials, including Clinton, liberally
commended India's development assistance for Afghanistan but shied away from
inviting Delhi to assist in capacity-building for Afghan security forces, which
is the number one challenge.
Washington factors in that Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani has
drawn a red line in regard to India's profile in Afghanistan and if the US
breaches it, there will be consequences.
So, why such US hype - that India is an "indispensable partner and a trusted
friend"; that "a rising India is good for the United States and good for the
world"; that the relations with India are "at the highest of priorities" for
the Obama administration; that India forms part of the "fundamental pillar" of
America's global engagement; that India and the US have "reached the stage
where our individual success at home and abroad depends on our cooperation"?
There is an overall belief in Washington, with some considerable justification,
that the Indians love flattery. But diplomacy is at once hardball, too. Three
main reasons can be attributed to the US statecraft. First, having India on its
side becomes a pragmatic need for the US to tackle certain key major foreign
policy challenges, especially climate change, the situation around Iran, the
endgame in Afghanistan, and nuclear non-proliferation.
The recent "course corrections" in Indian foreign policy seem to have caused
disquiet in Washington. The India-China cooperation at the Copenhagen summit on
climate change checkmated Western strategy and the two Asian powers put US
diplomacy at a disadvantage. Delhi is making a renewed effort to advance the
normalization with Beijing - although it needs two hands to clap.
Delhi is lately taking an independent line on Iran and even welcomed the
Turkey-Brazil-Iran enriched uranium swap deal, which patently undermines the
US's coercive diplomacy. Again, the endgame in Afghanistan is critically
dependent on Pakistan's cooperation, which in turn is linked to India-Pakistan
tensions and the US's capacity to moderate their historic rivalry.
Second, the US is robustly pushing exports to crank up its economy and the
Indian market offers tremendous potential. During the dialogue, US officials
demanded easier access to the Indian market for American goods and services
across the board, including a big share in military sales and nuclear commerce
and in such diverse fields as education, agriculture and energy.
Prospects have indeed brightened for the US to do away with residual
restrictions on transfers of sensitive technology to India, which opens up huge
prospects of military cooperation. Clearly, Washington senses that the Manmohan
Singh era of Indian policymaking will not last forever and would like to
accelerate the partnership agenda.
The Indian prime minister has been handed down some tough assignments like
legislating on areas facilitating US entry into nuclear commerce and education,
signing of a logistics support agreement for the use of Indian military bases
by the American military, "more rapid Indian consideration of reforms,
including the easing of caps on investment in critical sectors", etc.
Finally, there is unmistakably an international context in which the Obama
presidency in its second year is seeking out India as a partner to "work
together in Asia" and “build a new global commons - an international system in
which other democracies can flourish,” as US William J Burns, the US State
Department under secretary for political affairs, put it on June 1.
The Obama administration has dusted up the Bush-era doctrine at a time when new
tensions have come to the fore in the US-China relationship. A distinct
frostiness has appeared in the air while until recently the prognosis was about
a "G-2" in the making.
The US has resuscitated old ideas about joint patrolling of the maritime routes
in the Indian Ocean and coordinating South Asian policies where the two
countries have "complementary interests" and to build an axis involving India
and US with "other large Asia-Pacific democracies - Japan, Australia and South
Korea ... [for] cooperating more systematically on security issues."
Burns called on India to participate in the "institutional architecture of the
Asia-Pacific region" where "India's voice as a successful democracy is
important". He said, "We [US] share with India an interest in regional
stability and a geopolitical balance." (Emphasis added.)
He added the US's search for a "healthy relationship" with China in no way
becomes a "zero-sum game. Instead we [the US] attach great significance to
India's expanding role in East Asia, and welcome our partnership across the
region."
Delhi needs to assess what kind of relationship it wants with the US in the
21st century - how far its interests can be dovetailed with US efforts to gain
tactical advantages in the exercise of "smart power" vis-a-vis China. Not an
easy task considering that the US is a superpower in decline and its policies
lack consistency while China is certainly a power on the rise and it is a
difficult neighbor, too.
But then, Burns gently underscored that the Americans too have their angst
about India - "that India doesn't always see as clearly as others do how vital
its role in Asia is becoming. Some Americans worry that India is ambivalent
about its own rise in the world ... The further truth is that progress in
US-Indian partnership is not automatic ... Realizing the full potential of our
partnership in the years ahead will require some important choices from both
America and India. Partnership means more than just having shared values and
common interests. It also means developing complementary policies and habits of
cooperation. "
Put differently, India needs to do a careful cost-benefit analysis of the
geostrategy serving its long-term interests within a complex matrix of
almost-irreversible US-China interdependency.
Given an option, India probably prefers to pursue its own normalization with
China without being hustled by the US. Indeed, Krishna's next port of call is
Seoul, which faces somewhat comparable predicaments.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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