America’s Bad Bet on India

foreignaffairs.com/india/americas-bad-bet-india-modi

May 1, 2023

For the past two decades, Washington has made an

enormous bet in the Indo-Pacific—that treating India as
a key partner will help the United States in its
geopolitical rivalry with China. From George W. Bush
onward, successive U.S. presidents have bolstered
India’s capabilities on the assumption that doing so
automatically strengthens the forces that favor freedom
in Asia.

The administration of President Joe Biden has

enthusiastically embraced this playbook. In fact, it has
taken it one step further: the administration has
launched an ambitious new initiative to expand India’s
access to cutting-edge technologies, further deepened
defense cooperation, and made the Quad (Quadrilateral
Security Dialogue), which includes Australia, India,
Japan, and the United States, a pillar of its regional
strategy. It has also overlooked India’s democratic
erosion and its unhelpful foreign policy choices, such as
its refusal to condemn Moscow’s ongoing aggression in
Ukraine. It has done all of this on the presumption that
New Delhi will respond favorably when Washington
calls in a favor during a regional crisis involving China.

Washington’s current expectations of India are

misplaced. India’s significant weaknesses compared
with China, and its inescapable proximity to it,
guarantee that New Delhi will never involve itself in any
U.S. confrontation with Beijing that does not directly
threaten its own security.India values cooperation with
Washington for the tangible benefits it brings but does
not believe that it must, in turn, materially support the
United States in any crisis—even one involving a
common threat such as China.

The fundamental problem is that the United States and

India have divergent ambitions for their security
partnership. As it has done with allies across the globe,
Washington has sought to strengthen India’s standing
within the liberal international order and, when
necessary, solicit its contributions toward coalition
defense. Yet New Delhi sees things differently. It does
not harbor any innate allegiance toward preserving the
liberal international order and retains an enduring
aversion toward participating in mutual defense. It seeks
to acquire advanced technologies from the United States
to bolster its own economic and military capabilities and
thus facilitate its rise as a great power capable of
balancing China independently, but it does not presume
that American assistance imposes any further
obligations on itself.

As the Biden administration proceeds to expand its

investment in India, it should base its policies on a
realistic assessment of Indian strategy and not on any
delusions of New Delhi becoming a comrade-in-arms
during some future crisis with Beijing.

FAST FRIENDS

For most of the Cold War, India and the United States
did not engage in any serious conversations on national
defense, as New Delhi attempted to escape the
entanglements of joining either the U.S. or the Soviet
bloc. The two countries’ security relationship only
flourished after Bush offered India a transformative civil
nuclear agreement.

Thanks to that breakthrough, U.S.-Indian security

cooperation today is breathtaking in its intensity and
scope. The first and most visible aspect is defense
consultations. The two countries’ civilian leaders, as well
as their bureaucracies, maintain a regular dialogue on a
variety of topics, including China policy, India’s
procurement of advanced U.S. military technologies,
maritime surveillance, and undersea warfare. These
conversations vary in quality and depth but are critical
for reviewing strategic assessments, defining the
parameters of desired cooperation, and devising tools
for policy implementation. As a result, the United States
and India work together in ways that would have been
unimaginable during the Cold War. For example, they
cooperate to monitor China’s economic and military
activities throughout the wider Indian Ocean region and
have recently invested in mechanisms to share near-
real-time information about shipping movements in the
Indo-Pacific region with other littoral states.   

A second area of success has been military-to-military

collaboration, much of which takes place outside public
view. The programs for senior officer visits, bilateral or
multilateral military exercises, and reciprocal military
training have all expanded dramatically during the past
two decades. High-profile exercises most visibly
exemplify the scale and diversity of this expanded
relationship: the annual Malabar exercises, which bring
together the U.S. and Indian navies, have now expanded
to permanently include Japan and Australia; the Cope
India exercises provide an opportunity for the U.S. and
Indian air forces to practice advanced air operations;
and the Yudh Abhyas series involves the land forces in
both command post and field training activities.

Finally, U.S. firms have enjoyed notable success in

penetrating the Indian defense market. India’s military
has gone from having virtually no U.S. weapons in its
inventory some two decades ago to now featuring
American transport and maritime aircraft, utility and
combat helicopters, and antiship missiles and artillery
guns. U.S.-Indian defense trade, which was negligible
around the turn of the century, reached over $20 billion
in 2020.

But the era of major platform acquisitions from the

United States has probably run its course. U.S.
companies remain contenders in several outstanding
Indian procurement programs, but it seems unlikely that
they will ever enjoy a dominant market share in India’s
defense imports. The problems are entirely structural.
For all of India’s intensifying security threats, its defense
procurement budget is still modest in comparison with
the overall Western market. The demands of economic
development have prevented India’s elected
governments from increasing defense expenditures in
ways that might permit vastly expanded military
acquisitions from the United States. The cost of U.S.
defense systems is generally higher than that of other
suppliers because of their advanced technology, an
advantage that is not always sufficiently attractive for
India. Finally, New Delhi’s demand that U.S. companies
shift from selling equipment to producing it with local
partners in India—requiring the transfer of intellectual
property—often proves to be commercially unattractive,
given the small Indian defense market.

INDIA GOES IT ALONE

While U.S.-Indian security cooperation has enjoyed
marked success, the larger defense partnership still faces
important challenges. Both nations seek to leverage their
deepening ties to limit China’s assertiveness, but there is
still a significant divide in how they aim to accomplish
that purpose.

The U.S. goal in military-to-military cooperation is

interoperability: the Pentagon wants to be able to
integrate a foreign military in combined operations as
part of coalition warfare. India, however, rejects the idea
that its armed forces will participate in any combined
military operation outside of a UN umbrella.
Consequently, it has resisted investing in meaningful
operational integration, especially with the U.S. armed
forces, because it fears jeopardizing its political
autonomy or signaling a shift toward a tight political
alignment with Washington. As a result, the bilateral
military exercises may improve the tactical proficiency
of the units involved but do not expand interoperability
to the level that would be required in major combined
operations against a capable adversary.
India’s view of military cooperation, which emphasizes
nurturing diversified international ties, represents a
further challenge. India treats military exercises more as
political symbols than investments in increasing
operational proficiency and, as a result, practices with
numerous partners at varying levels of sophistication.
On the other hand, the United States emphasizes
relatively intense military exercises with a smaller set of
counterparts.

New Delhi has now prioritized Washington’s support

for its defense industrial ambitions

India’s priority has been to receive American assistance

in building up its own national capabilities so it can deal
with threats independently. The two sides have come a
long way on this by, for example, bolstering India’s
intelligence capabilities about Chinese military activities
along the Himalayan border and in the Indian Ocean
region. The existing arrangements for intelligence
sharing are formally structured for reciprocity, and New
Delhi does share whatever it believes to be useful. But
because U.S. collection capabilities are so superior, the
flow of usable information often ends up being one way.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has

increasingly focused on defense industrial cooperation
as the key driver of its security partnership with the
United States. Its underlying objective is to secure
technological autonomy: ever since its founding as a
modern state, India has sought to achieve mastery over
all critical defense, dual-use, and civilian technologies
and, toward that end, built up large public sector
enterprises that were intended to become global leaders.
Because this dream still remains unrealized, New Delhi
has now prioritized Washington’s support for its defense
industrial ambitions in tandem with similar
partnerships forged with France, Israel, Russia, and
other friendly states.

For over a decade, Washington has attempted to help

India improve its defense technology base, but these
efforts have often proved futile. During President Barack
Obama’s administration, the two countries launched the
Defense Trade and Technology Initiative, which aimed
to promote technology exchange and the coproduction
of defense systems. Indian officials visualized the
initiative as enabling them to procure many advanced
U.S. military technologies, such as those related to jet
engines, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, and
stealth capabilities,so that they could be manufactured
or codeveloped in India. But Washington’s hesitation
about clearing such transfers was matched by U.S.
defense firms’ reluctance to part with their intellectual
property and make commercial investments for what
were ultimately meager business opportunities.
WASHINGTON’S BIG BET

The Biden administration is now going to great lengths

to reverse the failure of the Defense Trade and
Technology Initiative. Last year,it announced the
Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, which
aims to fundamentally transform cooperation between
the two countries’ governments, businesses, and
research entities pertaining to technology development.
This endeavor encompasses a wide variety of fields,
including semiconductors, space, artificial intelligence,
next-generation telecommunications, high-performance
computing, and quantum technologies, all of which have
defense applications but are not restricted to them.

For all its potential, however, the Initiative on Critical

and Emerging Technology does not guarantee any
specific outcomes. The U.S. government can make or
break the initiative, as it controls the release of the
licenses that many joint ventures will require. Although
the Biden administration seems inclined to be more
liberal on this compared with its predecessors, only time
will tell whether the initiative delivers on India’s
aspirations for greater access to advanced U.S.
technology in support of Modi’s “Make in India, Make
for World” drive, which aims to transform India into a
major global manufacturing hub that could one day
compete with, if not supplant, China as the workshop of
the world.
The bigger question, however, is whether Washington’s
generosity toward India will help accomplish its
strategic aims. During the Bush and Obama
administrations, U.S. ambitions centered largely on
helping build India’s power in order to prevent China
from dominating Asia. As U.S.-China relations steadily
deteriorated during the Trump administration—when
Sino-Indian relations hit rock bottom as well—
Washington began to entertain the more expansive
notion that its support for New Delhi would gradually
induce India to play a greater military role in containing
China’s growing power.

There are reasons to believe it will not. India has

displayed a willingness to join the United States and its
Quad partners in some areas of low politics, such as
vaccine distribution, infrastructure investments, and
supply chain diversification, even as it insists that none
of these initiatives are directed against China. But on the
most burdensome challenge facing Washington in the
Indo-Pacific—securing meaningful military
contributions to defeat any potential Chinese aggression
—India will likely refuse to play a role in situations
where its own security is not directly threatened. In such
circumstances, New Delhi may at best offer tacit
support.

New Delhi’s relative weakness compels it to avoid

provoking Beijing.
Although China is clearly India’s most intimidating
adversary, New Delhi still seeks to avoid doing anything
that results in an irrevocable rupture with Beijing.
Indian policymakers are acutely conscious of the stark
disparity in Chinese and Indian national power, which
will not be corrected any time soon. New Delhi’s relative
weakness compels it to avoid provoking Beijing, as
joining a U.S.-led military campaign against it certainly
would. India also cannot escape its physical proximity to
China. The two countries share a long border, so Beijing
can threaten Indian security in significant ways—a
capability that has only increased in recent years.

Consequently, India’s security partnership with the

United States will remain fundamentally asymmetrical
for a long time to come. New Delhi desires American
support in its own confrontation with China while at the
same time intending to shy away from any U.S.-China
confrontation that does not directly affect its own
equities. Should a major conflict between Washington
and Beijing erupt in East Asia or the South China Sea,
India would certainly want the United States to prevail.
But it is unlikely to embroil itself in the fight.  

New Delhi’s deepening defense ties with Washington,

therefore, must not be interpreted as driven by either
strong support for the liberal international order or the
desire to participate in collective defense against
Chinese aggression. Rather, the intensifying security
relationship is conceived by Indian policymakers as a
means of bolstering India’s own national defense
capabilities but does not include any obligation to
support the United States in other global crises. Even as
this partnership has grown by leaps and bounds, there
remains an unbridgeable gap between the two countries,
given India’s consistent desire to avoid becoming the
junior partner—or even a confederate—of any great
power.

The United States should certainly help India to the

degree compatible with American interests.But it should
harbor no illusions that its support, no matter how
generous, will entice India to join it in any military
coalition against China. The relationship with India is
fundamentally unlike those that the United States enjoys
with its allies. The Biden administration should
recognize this reality rather than try to alter it.