Source: The Times of India
New Delhi, Washington: Who Gets What?When the transformation of US-India relations was just beginning early in the Bush administration, the then US ambassador to India, Robert D Blackwill, asked a group of Americans and Indians gathered in Aspen, Colorado, a pregnant question. In Sanjaya Baru's recent retelling, Blackwill directly challenged his interlocutors: "India wants the US to invest, India wants the US to keep its markets more open, India wants more visas for its professionals, India wants us to be helpful on Kashmir and in dealing with Pakistan, India wants US support for membership of the UN Security Council, India wants this and India wants that. Tell me what will India give in return?"
The question of what India can give the United States in return for the advantages it often seeks has remained one that many Americans have asked for some time now-and with growing urgency ever since George W Bush decided to change the global rules pertaining to nuclear cooperation to singularly favour India. Yet, it is not an easy question to answer and three different responses have been articulated thus far.
The first, one that reflects a classic benevolent liberalism, was advanced by George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In an essay published in the Washington Quarterly in 2003, Perkovich, acknowledging both India's weakness and its fierce desire to protect its national autonomy, emphasised that New Delhi does not "have the interest or power to augment US interests in many areas." But, that disinclination or incapacity did not matter because India was "too big and too important in the overall global community to measure in terms of its alignment with any particular US interest at any given time." In his judgment, India's real contribution to advancing US goals consisted not of a partnership in support of American aims but rather getting things right on the issues that mattered for the success of global order.
As Perkovich argued, "It matters to the entire world whether India is at war or peace with its neighbors, is producing increasing prosperity or poverty for its citizens, stemming or incubating the spread of infectious diseases, or mimicking or leapfrogging climate-warming technologies. Democratically managing a society as big, populous, diverse, and culturally dynamic as India is a world historical challenge. If India can democratically lift all of its citizens to a decent quality of life without trampling on basic liberties and harming its neighbors , the Indian people will have accomplished perhaps the greatest success in human history."
If the United States could aid this endeavour without strings attached and without undermining the hope of creating a global system governed by law, great. But since India would pursue its own interests independently anyway - because it does not believe that "others might help without asking anything in return" - Perkovich's response, in effect, deflects Blackwill's question: Far from India doing something for the United States or vice versa, the best US policy turns out to be one that leaves India alone. Perkovich's later opposition to the US-Indian civilian nuclear agreement was consistent with this perspective because, despite his sympathy for India and its quest for autonomy, he viewed the agreement as subverting the larger goal of creating a rule-bound global nuclear order even as Washington attempted to suborn New Delhi into a "strategic partnership" that collided with India's own vision of itself as an independent great power.
At the opposite end of the spectrum to Perkovich lies the transactional approach, which was urged by many critics of the nuclear deal with India. This second response to Blackwill's question advocates matching US initiatives towards India to different acts of reciprocity on the part of New Delhi. During the extended hearings on the nuclear deal, for example, many US legislators, influenced by the opponents, asked what New Delhi would do for Washington if the global regime was changed to exclusively accommodate India: Would India support US sanctions against Iran? Or cease producing fissile materials and formally renounce nuclear testing?
While such queries were understandable given the organic linkages between nuclear cooperation and nuclear proliferation, other expectations of reciprocity were far more expansive: thus, for example, some wondered why the resumption of nuclear cooperation with India should not be made conditional on increased American access to the Indian market, or increased Indian defense purchases of American equipment, or even new Indian initiatives for peace with Pakistan. Whatever the quid pro quo suggested, this approach takes Blackwill's question at face value and answers it by asserting that US efforts to favour India should be conditioned by what New Delhi is willing to do for Washington in return.
In my November 2005 testimony before the US House of Representatives on the "The US-India 'Global Partnership'" , I sought to provide an alternative to this calculating transactionalism. This third response is rooted in a strategic realism that incorporates elements of the benevolent liberalism articulated by Perkovich, but embeds it in a vision that orients the bilateral partnership towards serving certain common purposes.
Like Perkovich, I argued that the appropriate question to ask was not "What will India do for the United States?" - however natural that might appear. Rather, the real question ought to be, "Is a strong, democratic, (even if perpetually) independent, India in American national interest?" Since I held that the answer to this latter question was "yes" - and since this query was in fact the only appropriate one from a strategic realist perspective - the real issue boiled down to how Washington could assist the growth of Indian power so as to secure its larger global aims at lowest cost to itself and (if that is relevant) to any other competing national security objectives. This strategic realist response to Blackwill, thus, appears to invert his original question, but arguably engages it more profoundly.
Unlike Perkovich, who is content to leave India alone in order to let it realise its developmental goals because these achievements suffice to improve global order, the strategic realist emphasises the importance of the United States aiding India not as an act of altruism, but as a calculated contribution to creating, in Condoleezza Rice's famous phrase, a "balance of power that favours freedom." In other words, assisting India to develop its national capabilities is intended not merely to uplift its humanity - the goal that Perkovich endorses - but also, and equally importantly, to advance the vital US interest in preserving a stable geopolitical balance in Asia and globally.
To the degree that the American partnership with India aids New Delhi in growing more rapidly, it contributes - along with Japanese, Australian, and Southeast Asian power - towards creating those objective structural constraints that discourage China from abusing its own growing capabilities , even as Washington preserves good relations with Beijing and encourages all its Asian partners to do the same. American strategic generosity towards India, thus, remains an investment in its own geopolitical well being. And India's success itself, so long as it is not used to undermine America's vital interests, becomes New Delhi's strategic bequest to Washington-and the answer to Blackwill's question , "What will India give in return?"
The strategic realist vision, obviously, does not preclude either Washington or New Delhi asking of each other for different forms of assistance or support . In fact, it presumes that such aid will be frequently solicited and will often materialise. But it rejects the notion that any "exchange of considerations" between these two states will prove infructuous because their worldviews and their relative power are different - a premise that animates many versions of benevolent liberalism - just as it rejects equally the idea that US assistance to India should be conditioned principally on notions of strict or specific reciprocity.
Instead, the strategic realist approach views Washington's concerted support of New Delhi as desirable precisely because it advances larger American geopolitical interests. And although such help will be initially asymmetrical because of the differences in American and Indian power, it expects that New Delhi would see cooperation with Washington as being fundamentally in its own interest - and, by extension, act in ways that confirm this expectation whenever possible. Such responses would materialise not so much out of gratitude to the United States but because aiding the preservation of the American-led global order, in contrast to, say, acquiescing to the rise of a Chinese alternative, is necessarily consistent with India's own vital national interests. A generous American support for the growth of Indian power today, then, is not an irrational investment for Washington: it advances the strategic aims of both states, while creating the incentives for more robust forms of cooperation as India's own national power increases over time.
The Bush administration, in extraordinary measure due to Blackwill's own efforts in the early years, pursued policies towards India that embodied this strategic realist perspective. In fact, it stayed the course until the very end. Thanks both to his affection for India and his conviction about the strategic importance of the US-Indian partnership, Bush declined to shift towards a transactional approach even when some in his administration believed that the president ought to use his nuclear initiative to press India for concessions in order to secure the political prize of completing the Doha Round.
To be sure, no policy will conform strictly to just one of the three "ideal types" outlined above. Rather, US policies in practice will always remain complex mixtures of benevolent liberalism, transactional calculation, and strategic realism, with one or more of these facets dominating the others depending on the administration in office. Today, when the imperatives of balancing against the growth of Chinese power appear to be less pressing in Washington, it is possible that the transactional approach will grow in attractiveness.
Yet it should be understood that Barack Obama's administration, for all its efforts to distance itself from its predecessor, is not oblivious to the problems posed by rising Chinese power. Nor is Obama personally insensitive to the difference between India as a democratic friend and China as an authoritarian rival of the United States. Consequently , although the current economic and political compulsions facing Washington may favour a transactional approach, there is good reason to believe, particularly after the recent Obama-Singh summit, that Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton will successfully prevent this attitude from fundamentally defining the US-Indian partnership.
While this is a tribute to all the personalities involved and the rapport that has developed between them, it should be viewed as an opportunity to be seized by New Delhi rather than merely a bullet dodged. India's recent foreign policy history has been marked by bold - and often unexpected - initiatives. From the nuclear tests to the peace process with Pakistan to civilian nuclear cooperation with the US, both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh have pursued dramatic endeavors to India's advantage. There is no reason now to shy away from further bold actions that confirm India's continuing value to the US. From accelerated economic reforms at home to expanded bilateral defense cooperation to collaboration with Washington on regional and global issues, the opportunities for game-changing moves by New Delhi are legion.
Such actions would only strengthen President Obama's reluctance to pursue the transactional approach advocated by many in Washington towards India but it would also create the conditions for exploiting the full-fledged return to American strategic realism when that occurs. The importance of New Delhi boosting the bilateral partnership in this way cannot be underestimated. After all, it was barely a decade ago that Vajpayee set the ball rolling rapidly in the direction of decisive transformation through his government's audacious and astonishing decision in 2001 to cheer Bush's controversial revision of American strategic nuclear policy. What followed is now history. And it can be repeated.