How The US Helps India Counter The China Threat

Reports (not denied by India) that the USA had 'for the first time provided real-time details to their Indian counterparts on the Chinese positions and force strength in advance of a PLA incursion' into Tawang at the LAC in December 2022, helping India thwart China's expansionist designs, show how operationally effective the USA-India friendship has become on the ground.

A engaging excerpt from Sreeram Chaulia's must-read new book, Friends: India's Closest Strategic Partners.

What caused two erstwhile wary and alienated nations, the USA and India, to open a new page in history by committing to a strategic partnership in 2001 and operationalising it in 2004?

For New Delhi, it was the realisation that accessing American markets and technology as well as getting the USA, which was then the sole superpower in the world, on its side in geopolitical matters would be beneficial for India's rise.

On the American side, a rethink in grand strategy during the George W Bush administration got the ball rolling. Bush's National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned as early as in 2000 that 'China is not a 'status quo' power but one that would like to alter Asia's balance of power in its own favor.'

In this light, she recommended that Washington should stop looking at India through the traditional prisms of Pakistan and nuclear non-proliferation, and instead 'pay closer attention to India's role in the regional balance.'

Eyeing India as a 'swing state in international politics' which could tilt the scales and 'determine the ultimate outcome of the struggle between US and China' was 'one of the rationales behind the Indo-US rapprochement' under Bush.

The Bush team's 'more realist orientation than the Clinton administration's towards Asia' and its adoption of a 'dualist approach of economic engagement with China as well as balancing against its rise' played a big hand in kickstarting the strategic partnership with India, which began to be seen in Washington as 'a potential partner to balance against a rising China'.

The 'strategic generosity' which Washington displayed towards India by carving out exceptions to NPT rules and concluding a landmark civil nuclear deal that opened access to Western high-end technology for India, was not altruistic, but the USA's 'investment in its own geopolitical well-being'.

When the USA promised a 'decisively broader strategic relationship' with India whose 'goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century,' and added that 'we understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement,' Beijing took notice.

India's signing of the first foundational defence agreement with the USA, General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) in 2002, the launch of a New Framework for US-India Defense Relationship in 2005, and a Maritime Framework for Cooperation in 2006 had undertones of external balancing against China, as they increased the pace and intensity of intelligence sharing, joint exercises and consultations on the IOR.

Still, given that the USA itself was then hedging towards China, and was preoccupied with the GWOT, the strategic partnership was not consistently and single-mindedly focused on pushing back China.

The USA-India joint communiques and work agendas of bilateral summits in the Bush and early Obama presidencies harped more on jointly countering terrorism and jihadist extremism in the 'Af-Pak' (combined strategic space including Afghanistan and Pakistan) theatre than in checking China.

On the plus side of the ledger, what has worked for the friendship is that New Delhi and Washington have converged and coordinated far deeper for balancing China in the Modi era.

Prior to the advent of Modi, Indian leaders were wary about how far to go with the USA to check China, owing to a mix of domestic political and international considerations. A non-proactive strategic culture and unwillingness to take risks by aligning with friends against adversaries were typical traits of the pre-Modi period.

Indian scholars Harsh Pant and Yogesh Joshi observe that during the prime ministership of Manmohan Singh, India's stance towards the USA's attempted 'rebalance' or 'pivot' to Asia to counterbalance China was 'punctuated by reluctance and caution', owing to uncertainty about Washington's determination to stay the course against Beijing, 'residual anti-Americanism and nostalgia for non alignment' in New Delhi, and India's fears of incurring China's retaliatory wrath.

The USA-India Defense Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI), signed in 2012, also stuttered with no spectacular deliverables in defence co-production and co-development due to India's doubts as well as the USA's apprehensions about sharing cutting-edge sensitive dual-use technologies with an India that still had robust military ties with Russia.

Impressions in India that 'the US is not interested in sharing the latest defence technologies despite all the rhetoric of shared values, strategic convergence, and comprehensive partnership,' and that Washington preferred to keep selling more weapons to New Delhi instead of empowering it with the wherewithal to become a top defence manufacturer, held back the friendship from realizing its full military potential.

Defence cooperation grew significantly under Prime Minister Modi, who has been credited by American officials for 'a foreign policy that overcomes the hesitations of history and embraces the convergence between our two countries and our shared interests.'

Unencumbered by Left-wing ideological shackles, and driven by nationalistic conviction that India must become a leading power by harnessing its bilateral friendships to the maximum possible extent, Modi aimed for greater strategic dividend from the USA-India partnership and got it.

Even though he tried personal summit diplomacy with President Xi Jinping to stabilise relations with China and manage India's territorial disputes with its menacing northern neighbour, he came around to the firm conclusion that India's friendship with the USA must have a sharper strategic edge to sustain pressure on China.

The linear advances made under Modi with three very different presidents -- Obama, Trump and Biden -- read like a relentless march of milestones in the friendship.

In 2016, India received the bespoke status of 'major defense partner' of the USA and signed the second foundational defence agreement -- the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), after 14 long years.

In 2017, India and the USA revived the Quad with Australia and Japan after a decade of dormancy. In 2018, India signed the third foundational defence agreement -- the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA).

In 2020, the USA-India friendship was upgraded to 'comprehensive and global strategic partnership' (first mooted in 2013 but enacted in 2020), the Malabar naval exercises were permanently turned into quadrilateral format, and the last and final foundational document--Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA)--was inked.

To understand the sea change, it is worth recalling that BECA 'had been pending for over a decade-and-a-half after the earlier government [under Manmohan Singh] did not sign it because Left parties, which were part of the coalition, were strongly opposed to close ties with the US.'

All these landmarks in the bilateral friendship and its broader regional application in the Indo-Pacific were goaded by India's worsening relations with China, and the USA's move away from 'congagement' and shift to overt counterbalancing or containment of China.

For example, BECA was signed just four months after the deadly Galwan Valley clash between the Indian Army and China's PLA. It ushered in a new era of geospatial intelligence sharing to boost the Indian military's deterrence capabilities against China.

Reports (not denied by India) that the USA had 'for the first time provided real-time details to their Indian counterparts on the Chinese positions and force strength in advance of a PLA incursion' into Tawang at the LAC in December 2022, helping India thwart China's expansionist designs, show how operationally effective the USA-India friendship has become on the ground.

In the Indo-Pacific, Washington's vow to 'steadily advance our Major Defense Partnership with India and support its role as a net security provider' has advanced through major weapons sales and greater interoperability.

The USA's sale in 2024 of the General Atomics-manufactured MQ 9B Predator drones to India worth $4 billion promised to significantly boost the Indian Navy's surveillance and attack capabilities across the IOR and beyond.

This 'hunter-killer' capacity could enable India to not only deter the Chinese PLA navy's encroachment, but also strike at wanted jihadist terrorist targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan and beyond.

Apart from weaponry, the Pentagon's strategy of 'places not bases' -- 'pursuing access to more sites where the United States has no military installations of its own' -- has found a willing friend in India which has opened the 'door for a US military trying to stretch out across the Indo-Pacific and counter Chinese power'.

The emergence of the USA as India's largest military exercise partner augurs well for this kind of sophisticated defence diplomacy since the armed forces of the two sides are learning from and mingling with each other so much more today than ever before.

Cynicism expressed in some quarters in Washington, that India will sit out any collective fight to save Taiwan if China invades the self-governed island, or that India will not deploy its limited assets to the East or South China Seas to augment the USA's firepower in the West Pacific, misses out on the 'division of labour' formula, for the USA-India friendship to have a strategic effect.

India's military may not be ready for large-scale presence and deterrence missions east of the Malacca Strait, but as Lieutenant General Anil Ahuja, former co-chair of the India-US DTTI Inter-agency Task Force, has pointed out, 'The Indian Navy, with the support of the US and partners, can provide the nucleus for the maritime security architecture in the Indian Ocean, relieving the burden of deployment of scarce US military assets in the region.'

Whatever India can pitch in to enable the US Indo-Pacific Command to concentrate on China's eastern seaboard is worth its weight in gold.

There is also the huge commercial benefit to American defence manufacturers, who have gained substantial access to the gargantuan Indian arms market, and accounted for 11 per cent of India's total military imports between 2017 and 2022.

With defence taking a lion's share in the multifaceted USA India friendship in the Modi era, analysts have argued that 'if India has formally not entered into a "quasi-alliance" with the US yet, certainly it is on the threshold of one.'

Despite this 'quasi-alliance', India is expected to not lose sight of its eternal goal of strategic autonomy 'to avoid being labelled as a "deputy sheriff" to the USA and pursue its ambition to become a leading power in Asia.'

Whether the USA-India friendship will indeed morph into an alliance will depend on China's behaviour in years and decades to come.

Excerpted from Friends: India's Closest Strategic Partners by Sreeram Chaulia, with the kind permission from the publishers Rupa Publications India.