Michael Auslin has written a sobering piece on the Indo-U.S. partnership that hasn’t exactly panned out, at least not yet:
To hear Indian officials tell it, New Delhi is simply pursuing business as usual: working with all nations, avoiding problems with any one specifically. That includes China, which nearly everyone recognizes as the greatest long-term challenge to India’s security. Indians are quick to condemn China’s arming Pakistan with nuclear weapons and advanced fighters this month, but even that is not cause for a fundamental rethink of New Delhi’s policies, I’m told: India cannot afford to antagonize China when its economy is still a quarter the size of China’s.
Former military officials I spoke with seem far more eager for an enhanced partnership, provided that Washington releases more goods for Foreign Military Sales, especially for the navy. Yet others, including diplomats and academics, take pains to argue that America will remain but one important partner of India.
This continued adherence to Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-aligned strategy clearly animates the worldview of most thinkers here, even if the language used to describe it no longer partakes of such Cold War imagery. There is a firm commitment in New Delhi not to have any firm commitments to any one state. It seems the Indians have taken to heart, far more than the Americans, George Washington’s warning against entangling foreign alliances.
And there may well be wisdom in this wariness. But one thing that Indian policymakers need to keep in mind is that democratic states don’t turn on a dime. A classical autocrat might be able to briskly shift alliances with little domestic blowback, but countries like India and the United States have many stakeholders. It takes time to build trust between national security bureaucracies, and the consistent performance of small courtesies and more.
I say all of this because the Chinese elite, as Minxin Pei reports, isn’t exactly enthusiastic about India’s rise:
At the mass level, ignorance, stereotyping, and latent hostility characterize the views of India held by a large segment of Chinese society. At the elite level, while interest in India is growing rapidly, the discourse on India is heavily polarized and politicized. As a result, the quality of analysis of India’s ongoing transformation is relatively low. Most worrisome, while elites affiliated with the government tend to discount India’s potential as a great power, they obsessively worry about India’s role as a strategic counterweight that could be used by the West in containing China. The combination of under-appreciation of India’s achievement and exaggeration of India’s role as a geopolitical rival could generate dangerous self-reinforcing dynamics that may make strategic competition between India and China more likely in the future.
The polarization of views is quite interesting:
The fiercest battle within China over India’s rise, however, is being fought in the realm of ideas, specifically whether India’s democratic and entrepreneurial model of development is a viable alternative to China’s autocratic statist model. The opinions on this debate are polarized within the Chinese elite communities on ideological lines. Predictably, liberals endorse the Indian model while the nationalists reject and belittle it. Interestingly, official commentators are relatively restrained in their criticisms of the India model even as they constantly use some of the well-known socioeconomic problems in India – poverty, poor infrastructure, and the caste system – as proof of the superiority of the Chinese system.
If China does evolve in a more liberal, representative direction, ironically, latent hostility on the part of the Chinese masses will presumably play a larger role in Chinese policy towards India, in contrast to the views of China’s (small) liberal elite.
This suggests to me that India would be wise to invest more energy and effort in cultivating stronger ties to the United States, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Australia, and other regional powers that would be inclined to resist the emergence of a regional hegemon, a still-distant but not unimaginable threat.