Narendra Modi is preparing to make his eighth visit to the United States as India’s prime minister. Although previous U.S. administrations have received Modi warmly, the fanfare surrounding this trip—the Indian prime minister’s first official state visit to Washington—will be unparalleled. He is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress. And as a parting gift, Modi will likely leave the United States having secured a long-coveted deal for General Electric to share technology and jointly produce military jet engines with India.
Such an enthusiastic reception is undoubtedly intended to reset relations with India. Although both countries are ostensibly committed to a partnership, the U.S.-Indian relationship has not lived up to its potential in recent years. The United States must shoulder some of the blame for this failure. Successive U.S. administrations ignored India’s warnings about negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Biden administration has continued to pursue a relationship with India’s rival Pakistan even after U.S. priorities in Asia have shifted toward dealing with China. Washington has also flubbed more routine diplomatic issues such as visa processing, with record backlogs in U.S. consulates in India that only recently ebbed. And it took more than two years for the U.S. Senate to confirm former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as ambassador to India, hampering Washington’s ability to advance its interests in New Delhi.
For their part, U.S. officials seem to be waking up to the promises—and the limits—of a strong relationship with India. It is unclear whether the same can be said for Indian leaders. New Delhi continues to harbor a variety of misgivings about forging a genuine partnership with the United States. Despite ongoing clashes at the disputed border with China, India has resisted embracing its security partnership with Australia, Japan, and the United States—known as the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—designed to protect the Indo-Pacific from Chinese aggression. At the same time, both Modi and his foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, have been praised at home for their staunch refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This stance of neutrality, they have argued, best serves India’s interests. Since the invasion in February 2022, India has undoubtedly benefited from a steady supply of cheap Russian oil as the Kremlin has scrambled to secure alternative buyers for its energy commodities. But New Delhi’s relations with Moscow occupy a shrinking portion of Indian foreign policy. In the long run, Russia’s growing dependence on China will make it an unreliable partner.
India rightly wants to guarantee itself strategic autonomy as it continues to rise in the world. But such a vision will not be fully realized if India continues to imagine that it can indefinitely play to all sides. Nonalignment may work in specific instances, but it will not serve India well in the long term. Instead, India should forge a strong partnership with the United States. With U.S. support, India can reassert its control over South Asia and emerge as a strong pole of regional order in the Indo-Pacific.
TIME WARPMost of India’s concerns about the United States hark back to another era in global politics. New Delhi, it seems, is caught in a time warp. Key members of India’s foreign policy elite remain fixated on the United States’ relationship with Pakistan during the Cold War and fear its renewal. This belief, although perhaps understandable given the record of U.S. policy toward South Asia, is nevertheless flawed: the United States and Pakistan have never been and are not now as close as Indian policymakers tend to imagine them to be. It is to the credit of the Trump administration that the United States finally called Pakistan’s bluff and terminated all military aid. Since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, some in the Biden administration have proposed a limited strategic relationship with Pakistan focused on counterterrorism. But Washington’s efforts to secure this new partnership with Islamabad have been halting at best. Although some U.S. foreign policy thinkers still support Pakistan over India, the Beltway establishment is finally recognizing India’s primacy in South Asia. There is little reason to believe that the United States, whether under this administration or a future one, would want to resurrect its old alliance with Pakistan, especially if it comes at the expense of a partnership with India.
India’s supremacy in its neighborhood is not challenged by Pakistan or the United States but instead by China. In Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and even within India’s own borders, China represents an existential threat to New Delhi’s strategic autonomy. Indian and Chinese soldiers have massed along the disputed mountainous border between the two countries, with bloody skirmishes breaking out sporadically. India currently possesses neither the domestic military capabilities (what scholars of international security refer to as “internal balancing”) nor the foreign partnerships (“external balancing”) to guarantee its security interests and protect its northern borders from the Chinese incursions that have been accelerating since 2019.
Some within India’s security establishment continue to believe that Russia may yet serve as a possible bulwark against China. These expectations stem from the Soviet Union’s role during the Cold War and India’s continuing dependence on Russia for defense equipment and spare parts. Recent developments, however, suggest that this hope is rather fanciful. Russia, preoccupied with its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, has already failed to deliver some military supplies that it had contracted to provide India. And New Delhi’s assiduously cultivated neutral position on the invasion has not prevented Moscow from turning to Beijing, India’s long-term competitor and adversary. Russia has grown only closer to and more dependent on China since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. It simply cannot play the role India wants it to in checking China.