US defence policy places India as a security partner in Asia

From the detachment of the Cold War era to a realignment, long-term interests are driving deeper security ties between the two countries

During the Cold War, depending on the administration in office, India was either seen at worst as a mildly antagonistic state or, at best, a country that was mostly irrelevant to US security concerns. Some administrations, especially in the early Cold War, viewed India’s commitment to non-alignment as downright unhelpful. In fact, President Eisenhower’s staunchly anti-Communist Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, referred to the doctrine as “immoral”. Others thought of it as quaint and pointless. President Richard Nixon and his opportunistic National Security Adviser (and subsequently Secretary of State), Henry Kissinger, were openly hostile towards India, especially after New Delhi had signed the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1971. 

 

Even after the Cold War, the two parties, while extolling their shared democratic values and institutions, could find little common ground when it came to matters of international and regional security. Successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, admonished India for its flawed human rights record when it was trying to suppress the insurgency in Kashmir in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Also, they were at odds with India for its pursuit of a nuclear weapons programme outside the ambit of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968.   

Ironically, it was India’s nuclear tests of May 1998 that contributed to a meaningful security dialogue between New Delhi and Washington, DC. However, these discussions ended with New Delhi conceding little or no ground to Washington, DC. Indeed, it was not until the second George W Bush administration that Washington, DC, decided to initiate a conversation with India about its nuclear weapons programme. As is well-known, this culminated in the landmark 2008 US-India nuclear accord. This agreement enabled India to keep its nuclear weapons infrastructure while placing its civilian reactors under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.  

Ostensibly, this deal was designed to enable India to meet its growing energy needs. Left unstated, however, was the administration’s interest in bringing India on board to serve as a strategic bulwark against an increasingly assertive People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Asia. During its first term, the Obama administration, Bush’s successor, evinced little interest in India. The only meaningful form of cooperation that had emerged during his first term was the incipient steps towards the formation of the Quadrilateral Security Initiative, popularly referred to as the Quad, in the wake of the devastating December tsunami of 2004. In its wake, Australia, India, Japan, and the United States coordinated a significant humanitarian response to aid the victims across South and Southeast Asia. 

However, during his second term, after his many overtures towards Beijing did not prove fruitful on several fronts, Barack Obama embarked on the “pivot to Asia”, which involved shifting significant military resources from the Middle East and deploying them in Asia. In this context, India once again came to be seen as a possible counterweight to the PRC. Furthermore, Obama’s secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, also became convinced that India, under the right circumstances, may prove willing to work with the United States to forge a countervailing coalition against the PRC even as it maintained its prickly independence and steadfastly refused to enter an alliance with the US. To that end, before the administration ended, he designated India as a “major defence partner”, thereby facilitating Indian weapons acquisitions from the US

The first Trump administration, while it started its initial complaints about India’s tariff regime, squarely placed New Delhi in its defence strategy toward Asia. This, in large measure, stemmed from two key factors. First, Trump was inherently distrustful of the PRC and its global ambitions. Second, he had several key, senior defence personnel who shared his misgivings about the PRC. Consequently, his National Security Strategy, which was unveiled in December 2017, made it abundantly clear that while the US was prepared to cooperate with the PRC in Asia, it viewed many of the latter’s actions on the continent with considerable alarm and concern. In this context, the strategy reaffirmed the desire of the US to deepen its cooperation with India in the context of the Quad. 

In 2018, the then secretary of defense, James Mattis, changed the name of the United States Pacific Command to the Indo-Pacific Command. The change in the nomenclature was not cosmetic. Instead, it reflected two important factors. First, that the ties between the Indian and the Pacific oceans were seamless. Second, it also reflected the growing strategic significance the US had come to attach ­­to India.  

Another development that also underscored the importance of India was the initiative secretary Mattis undertook the same year. This was the creation of the 2-plus-2 dialogue. This involved an annual meeting of the US secretary of state along with the US secretary of defence with their Indian counterparts, the minister for external affairs and the minister of defence. Since its creation, it has met every year and focused on shared foreign and security policy concerns.  Apart from an understandable emphasis on the Indo-Pacific, the dialogue has encompassed a range of international security issues.