May 27, 2021
Amid the rising assertiveness of China, the worldviews and interests of U.S. and India are presently converging in unprecedented ways. After President Joe Biden took office, the Indo-Pacific has become the front and center of U.S. foreign policy as Washington adopts a renewed multilateral approach in the region. How will U.S.-India relations evolve in the post-pandemic era? What does the first 100 days of the Biden administration tell us? How important are shared values in the overall context of bilateral relations? To address these questions, the Rising Powers Initiative at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and Christ University in Bangalore, invited a panel of leading experts to discuss the prospects for U.S. India relations, including Alyssa Ayres, Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University, Daniel Twining, President of the International Republican Institute, Joshua White, Associate Professor of Practice of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Richard M. Rossow, Senior Adviser and Wadhwani Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at Center for Strategic & International Studies.
The purpose of the conference was to engage a younger demographic of students and young professionals in Bangalore and around the region on new directions in U.S.-India cooperation related to growing challenges in the Indo-Pacific. The conference attracted over 700 registrants and nearly 600 attendees. In this Policy Brief we examine the panel’s insights on how the U.S. and India could develop comprehensive relations beyond security and economic interests in the coming years.
Converging Interests
With the conference occurring against the grim backdrop of the devastating second Covid wave in India, the Charge d’Affaires of the U.S. Mission to India, Don Heflin, relayed a message expressing solidarity in these challenging times and detailed the ongoing efforts to send critical assistance to India. (As of mid-May, the U.S. government stands as the top donor in Covid assistance to India). He reiterated American commitment to ensuring that the Quad countries—Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.—meet their joint pledge to deliver up to one billion vaccines to Indo-Pacific countries, reaching one-seventh of the world’s population.
The Pro Vice Chancellor of Christ University, Fr. Jose, in his keynote, pointed to the common multicultural nature of U.S. and Indian societies and the global value that this represents. As India seeks to be a self-reliant world power, it needs strong and reliable partners. “Who else can we look to other than the United States of America?” he queried.
Indeed, bilateral relations between the world’s two biggest democracies – the U.S. and India – have seen significant developments in recent years. Ayres kicked off the panel discussion by highlighting two main drivers of improving U.S.-India relations. First, India has become a major defense partner of the U.S. as the two countries have conducted more joint military exercises and established closer defense technology cooperation while being proponents of a free and open Indo-Pacific through the Quad. Second, Indian-Americans have become influential leaders in the U.S. in academia, journalism, technology, medicine, as well as the political arena.
Twining suggested that the dynamics of great power competition vis-à-vis China and the shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific are the main factors for the warming U.S.-India relations. Despite being two of the world’s largest democracies, the Cold War had distorted and constrained cooperation between U.S. and India. As both countries started confronting an increasingly assertive authoritarian China in the Indo-Pacific, shared interests in maintaining the model of free and open societies and defending the international system of peaceful rule-based dispute settlement are motivating closer cooperation. From freedom of the seas to open digital architecture, the partnership between the two democracies represents the need for free and open societies to demonstrate an alternative model to China’s surveillance, control, and repression. Twining described the Indo Pacific region as the “cockpit of wealth and power in the 21st century, which will determine the nature of the international order,” and argued that as “India and the United States have free and open societies, they have so much at stake in getting this right.”
White also emphasized the improvement of security cooperation between the U.S. and India, which saw significant advancements after the civil nuclear deal during the George W. Bush administration. Security cooperation between the two countries initially met with a good deal of resistance within the U.S. security institutions, but the mindset in Washington regarding India’s role as a security partner gradually shifted over time. Even though the two countries may not be totally consistent on the discourse vis-à-vis China, Washington and New Delhi share the same concerns toward China’s rising military presence in the Indo-Pacific, as well as similar views on the role of Pakistan in the scourge of global terrorism.
Looming Differences
Despite the recent steep upward trajectory of U.S.-India relations, there remains a number of areas where interests diverge between the two countries. Ayres pointed out that New Delhi favors the rise of Indian power as one of several global powers in a multipolar order, which is inconsistent with how Washington views the world. For decades, Washington practiced foreign policy with either a bipolar or a unipolar vision while having strong alliance relationships with European and Asia Pacific partners. Although Washington has become more sensitive to New Delhi’s multipolar vision, strategic divergence persists. Ayres also suggested that discussions about democratic institutions is another sensitive area where New Delhi has objected to external comments on its domestic affairs, especially when the U.S. itself has many problems of its own. Washington is best positioned when the U.S. offers a powerful example and lives up to the democratic ideals.
Twining agreed with Ayres and emphasized that both countries need to work closer together to improve their democratic institutions and to demonstrate how these institutions are the sources of strength in free and open societies. He conceded that neither the U.S. nor India are “perfect democracies” but pointed out “that is no reason to stop trying, and that is no reason to somehow deter ourselves from working more closely together.” In addition, Twining argued that interests and values are indeed inseparable in the partnership between U.S. and India. Cooperation between the two democracies is about defending the value of a free and open way of life in the Indo-Pacific against the threat of China’s authoritarian control and repression. Both Washington and New Delhi need to emphasize this fundamental alignment of the value and interests in the bilateral relationship.
Unlike the converging security interests and worldviews, economic cooperation between the U.S. and India saw mixed outcomes in recent years. Rossow stated that before the pandemic, bilateral trade and direct investment were improving – especially in the IT service industry, which is the bedrock of U.S.-India economic relations – but Washington and New Delhi were also engaged in an intense trade war. He finds that despite the initial momentum, U.S. companies began to lose interest in the Indian market as New Delhi started to put barriers on its economic borders while Washington reciprocated in full. After the pandemic, New Delhi initiated some economic reforms in spite of domestic opposition, but Rossow remains skeptical about the prospect of economic relations between the two countries. Despite the need to recover from the pandemic, both countries seem to be unwilling to reverse the existing protectionist trade policies, even under the Biden team.
Taking Actions to Move the Needle
The improvement in security relations and the convergence of shared interests have enabled a wide range of opportunities in future cooperation between the U.S. and India. To reconcile with New Delhi’s vision of a multipolar international order, Ayres proposed that Washington should support more Indian representation in institutions of global governance. Given the difficulty of changing the status quo in the UN Security Council, the U.S. could start with something more feasible, including India’s participation in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and in G7. Moreover, Ayres suggested that more American students need to study in India. Despite India sending the second largest number of international students to the U.S. at about 200,000 students annually, students going in the other direction are low. Less than 4,000 students from the U.S. studied in India in 2018, and that number dropped to 3,366 in 2019, which is about one tenth of American students in the U.K and less than one third of American students in China. Ayres asserted that increasing the number of U.S. students in India is crucial for strengthening all aspects of U.S.-India ties and for enhancing the shared worldview between the two countries.
Twining proposed that the future cooperation between the U.S. and India should focus on how diffusion of new technologies could empower the citizens, make governments more responsive, and ultimately drive outcomes that would enhance broad-based prosperity. It is necessary for the U.S. and India to work together and counter the technology of surveillance and control disseminated by China’s Belt and Road Initiative. From the establishment of digital infrastructure to the revolution of clean energy, the U.S. and India need to partner with other like-minded countries and offer a free and open alternative to China’s authoritarian model.
White suggested that the two countries have put too much weight on defense and security and that bilateral relationship should be more comprehensive. Based on the existing foundations, Washington and New Delhi need to continue building habits of cooperation, which allows existing partnerships to evolve from one area to another. Moreover, the two countries should work closely in developing next generation technology, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced manufacturing, which would fit well with New Delhi’s Make in India initiative. To achieve these goals, however, White pointed out that India would need to overcome the challenge of having mixed defense equipment and security systems from different supplier countries, as well as the challenge of constrained fiscal budgets.
Rossow suggested that government-led initiatives will be the main driver of economic cooperation between the U.S. and India. Despite the existing challenges in bilateral trade, Washington and New Delhi should be able to initiate economic collaboration, especially in the area of 5G communication and information security. However, in order to truly energize the economic relations between the two countries and to attract U.S. investments in the critical areas like infrastructure and renewable energy, he argued India needs to significantly improve its legal and financial architecture, as well as the transparency and competency of state governments, so that the country will be able to accommodate private investments in an open and transparent way. Further, Rossow warned that the Made in China 2025 plan essentially shows Beijing’s agenda is to “dominate global manufacturing and production flows,” and called on U.S. and India to cooperate more especially given the Chinese government’s worrisome economic statecraft.
Building Momentum for Future Relations: Role of Values
Discussants Madhumati Deshpande and N. Manoharan reflected some questioning by Indian students about just how much the U.S. was willing to do to facilitate India’s rise in the context of competing American ties to Pakistan, whether U.S. interests was simply confined to countering China in the Indo-Pacific, and what was ultimately expected from India—common values notwithstanding.
Speakers in turn illustrated how a common worldview and habits of cooperation enhance bilateral strategic trust, an essential ingredient for any strong and enduring partnership. White called values “tremendously important…the feeling that exists in the U.S. Congress and among the American people that India is a country and people with shared values, really shapes the willingness of the Congress and the administration to go out of its way to help India find an exceptional role on the world stage.” Likewise, Twining says that ultimately “It’s not just a question of who’s going to control the sea lanes or what the trade balance is going to be—these are secondary questions, the foundational issue is that the free and open way of life that Indians and Americans want to lead will become harder and harder to sustain in a world in which we are not working together very strongly to sustain global public goods and to sustain a free and open order.”
Conference moderator Deepa Ollapally acknowledged that shared values do not automatically translate into shared material interests. But she suggests that in the case of India and the U.S., over the past several years, shared worldviews themselves are influencing and shaping more tangible foreign policy interests. This is in no small part due to the growing recognition that the threats they both face in the Indo-Pacific could transcend geopolitics and economics and include whether the regional order remains transparent and open or not. So far, the Indo-Pacific has been central in the Biden administration’s crafting of post-pandemic foreign policy. With the striking vulnerabilities that the pandemic exposed in having global supply chains over concentrated in China, the issue of strategic trust is likely to gain even more currency according to Ollapally. And here again, like-minded countries like the U.S. and India will find more common cause. Ayres summed up the relations by noting that “We do not necessarily see absolutely every single issue in the same way, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t closer now than ever before in the past.” In facilitating this bond, it would be a mistake to underestimate the role of shared worldviews.
By Dennis Li, Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science Department, and Graduate Research Assistant, Rising Powers Initiative, George Washington University.
This Policy Brief is a part of the ‘Shared Values and Worldviews in U.S.-India Relations’ project of the United States Government, George Washington University and Christ University. The opinions expressed here are solely of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Government, George Washington University or Christ University.
