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A Common Enemy
Strategic Vision, Special Issue (Summer, 2021)
Beijing’s Increasing assertiveness driving New Delhi closer to Washington
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Raviprasad Narayanan
We are all witnesses to, and participants in, the unsettling emergence of a new world order, beginning with the Asia-Pacific. After a decades-long acceptance of Pax Americana, Washington is facing challenges in the economic and strategic realms from an emergent Pax Sinica: a world order with Chinese characteristics. US President Joe Biden, a Democrat, is not very different from his predecessor, Donald Trump, a Republican, when it comes to foreign strategic policy. This surprising consistency on how to handle China indicates a policy continuity in Washington. Early indications point to strategic instabilities becoming a new template in the Asia-Pacific region. This article examines the position adopted by India as it witnesses the beginnings of a new Cold War with Asian characteristics, between United States and China: a redux with strategic posturing by both sides, impinging on New Delhi’s policy choices.
The early decades of India’s external engagements since its independence in 1947 were marked by the adoption and articulation of a foreign policy of nonalignment in a post-war world where bloc rivalry had polarized international relations. If there was a bilateral engagement between established democracies in Asia that had fallen short of expectations, it was un-
Chinese soldiers stationed near the Indian border at Sikkim. PLA and Indian troops have clashed in the disputed area, with injuries on both sides.
photo: BMN Network
doubtedly that between Washington and New Delhi. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was an early expression by countries that had gained their freedom from colonialism. What gave ideological impetus to the NAM was the structure of the United Nations comprising a couple of colonial powers, which left many countries in Africa and Asia a legacy of economic privation and political stagnation.
Capt. Eric Anduze, right, speaks with Indian Navy Vice Chief of Naval Staff Vice Adm. G. Ashok Kumar.
photo: Sean Lynch
India’s Growing Role
Several decades after the end of the Cold War, a sobering assessment is taking place between three members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, France, and the United Kingdom—on a growing role for India in security matters. China and Russia are watching India’s shift towards the United States on security matters. A renewed push on both sides—Washington and New Delhi—is being undertaken to correct a decades-long drift and to arrive at a mutually satisfactory relationship where economic connectivity and strategic congruence merge into a real bilateral bond with institutional heft, unencumbered by the problems of the past. In other words, the form and substance of the bilateral relationship between the two countries was divergent with very little, if any, common ground for a long time. India’s nonalignment was, to the United States, akin to being a member of the former Soviet bloc. If current trends are to be seen as a bilateral and multilateral systemic shift epitomized by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, then we are witnessing an epochal moment in geopolitics with India and the United States beginning a strategic symmetry. Why? Of course, the emergence of China is driving the two countries closer together.
The United States has shown continuity in identifying China as a threat. The Republican Party under Trump and the Democratic Party led by incumbent President Biden are united on precious few issues, but on this they are in agreement: China, as the potential largest economy in the world with an investment and security architecture already in place, poses a very real, existential risk to Washington’s position as the upholder of democratic values. To the United States, the post-World War II era exemplified economic success at home while rebuilding war-ravaged economies decimated by the fight against fascism. Then came the threat posed by another ideology: Communism. The implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Cold War for certain, but it unleashed new vectors in strategic affairs, with Westphalian norms being challenged by quasi-states and non-state actors. Many were flummoxed by the emergence of China as an economic power player. As China expands in economic terms, its behavior is increasingly a unilateral affair of enforcing ideas and ideology—the latter being far more worrying.
Alternative to BRI
Biden’s Build Back Better World (B3W) global infrastructure spending initiative has been welcomed, up to a point. A continuation of the effort, begun by Trump, to offer an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, B3W is domestic policy in the United States, which is grappling with the intricacies of China’s economic growth reaching levels where technology will be the determinant. This would negate the boots-on-the-ground approach that has made the United States the paramount strategic power. The US Innovation and Competition Act, which builds upon the Endless Frontier Act of 2020, seeks to invest US$200 billion on semiconductors, wireless broadband, artificial intelligence and drones, with more federal oversight into technologies being developed.
From India’s perspective, B3W is an illustration of how the United States is trying to advance its interests, even as the odds are against an entity with immense resources and determination. The aspect that is most welcomed by India are the prospects of
WorldSkillsIndian engineers represent their country at an international robotics competition.
photo: WorldSkills
Indian Air Force crew members prepare the Ilyushin IL-76 to participate in Exercise Cooperative Cope Thunder in Alaska..
photo: Matthew Hannen
investments in technology, especially robotics, where software development means employment for Indian engineers, complemented by high-technology transfers from the United States. This would help firmly establish their presence in a country wanting more strategic bandwidth. The devil in the detail is India’s hesitancy when it comes to making decisions. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, comprising the ASEAN member nations as well as five of New Delhi’s leading trade partners including China, does not yet include India, owing to a slack response by politicians in New Delhi.
Forging Cautious Ties
In May 1998, India conducted a series of nuclear bomb test explosions that led to global opprobrium. Perhaps the shrillest voice criticizing the nuclear tests was that of the United States. India’s nuclear tests at Pokhran invited global economic sanctions and the freezing of loans and grants, the only exception being humanitarian aid. The decades since have seen Washington and New Delhi forge cautious yet encouraging institutional ties designed to strengthen economic and strategic ballast. It should come as no surprise that China is the active determinant bringing the world’s largest democracies together. Beijing has been described as a “spoiler” and a “norm evader,” and its growing geo-economic and geostrategic influence presents a threat to the established structures of global governance.
A close reading of the diplomatic semantics between New Delhi and Washington reveals a complete turnaround in the latter’s evaluation of India. From its nadir in 1998 due to the aforementioned nuclear tests, repeated high-level visits marked the beginning of a new era of engagement driven by domestic and external factors, with growing commonalities actively encouraging the two sides to harmonize their views. Since both countries abide by established international norms, a congruence of views is taking place, with both countries taking steps to address erstwhile misgivings and replacing distrust with a commitment that will stand the test of time. In other words, they are two actors that share normative values and subscribe to an order where constructive cooperation, not shrill rhetoric, makes for a predictable pattern of state behavior.
Sailors prepare to fire a .50-caliber machine gun aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65).
photo: Deanna Gonzales
China’s rapid emergence as an economic power to become the world’s second-largest economy, on course to supplant the United States within the next few years as the first, has set off alarm bells in established democracies. The discomfort of a new economic order is clouded by possible political uncertainties and the geopolitical order being rewired in Beijing’s image. Beyond their bilateral (and quadrilateral) agreements, what characterizes relations between the United States and India is their steadfast adherence to democracy. It is this temperament that guides the two countries as they face China and its growing negative centrality in the Indo-Pacific region. The strategic determinant emerges, as the two countries acknowledge with wariness the growing power and heft of China in the region.
Rallying Domestic Nationalism
China’s increasing centrality to power politics in the Asia-Pacific comes at the expense of established norms in the region. The belligerent posture adopted by Beijing serves to rally domestic nationalism. China’s aggressive posturing in the maritime sphere—the South China Sea in particular—indicates an increasing restlessness on the part of Beijing, as evidenced by creating a legal cover termed the Maritime Silk Road Initiative, which has allowed the People’s Liberation Army Navy to establish a presence in South Asia (Hambantota and Colombo, Sri Lanka), and Djibouti in East Africa, located close to the Persian Gulf.
The last couple of years have seen Asia-Pacific security evolving into Indo-Pacific security. This subtle shift in terminology acknowledges the geographical centrality of vast, realm-straddling continental and maritime zones that are host to diverse security issues. The Quad’s ideology seeks to knit democracies together to defend and deconstruct challenges. In strategic terms, the Indian Navy’s annual Malabar exercises, where regular participation is much appreciated by India, was demonstrated by the Quad’s display of security linkages with the broad Defense Framework Agreement, concerning the Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology and Security Measures for the Protection of Classified Military Information. Australia and Japan, the other two members of the Quad, are delighted with the participation of the United Kingdom and France and other European Union member countries, and becoming sentinels at a time when the cult of personality surrounding China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, appears to be reshaping everything Chinese, overshadowing even the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Chinese irredentism, aggressive behavior and willful subversion of established international norms is encouraging India to establish a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the United States. The two countries, as democracies, understand the complications that can arise out of the emergence of a China that appears to be rearranging the existing institutional and multilateral arrangements in the region to establish a Pax Sinica, where power would not be distributed but rather would be more akin to a centrifugal force radiating outwards from Beijing. China’s almost unstoppable rise in economic and strategic terms encourages an Asia where a plethora of political systems exist under the “benevolent” politico-economic tutelage of a China once again in its “natural place” at the political center of the region, thereby erasing a “century of humiliation” that began with the Opium Wars of the 1840s.
Selective Use of History
The legitimacy of the CCP rests upon Beijing’s selective rewriting of history. The selective use of history by Beijing justifies and encourages the vilification of its neighbors and squelches any independent attempt to intellectually revisit the ideological excesses at home, especially the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. To India, China’s invocation of history is flawed. For example, China’s claim that what it calls Xinjiang has been a part of China since ancient times is, at best,
Situated high in the Nathula Pass, the Sherathang Trade Mart provides customs and tax service for India-China trade in the area.
photo: Shankar S.
ahistorical, and certainly not justification enough for the human rights abuses that Beijing is committing in East Turkestan. This is but one of the many inconsistencies highlighting the insecurities of one-party rule, and within that, a personality centric governance with domestic and international implications.
The common determinant influencing foreign strategic decision making in Washington and New Delhi is China. This stretches further to include Canberra and Tokyo, where policymakers also have concerns about China. Beijing’s policies in the maritime realm and the mountains bordering India play an important role in the domestic politics of India, pushing the government to adopt an obdurate stand against China. In New Delhi’s case, the humiliating defeat to China in 1962 still reverberates in strategic policy circles. To India, China’s aggressive posturing in the high Himalayas (Doklam and Galwan in particular) are aimed at capturing the water resources that flow into lower riparian countries like India and Bangladesh.
Added to New Delhi’s discomfort is China’s success in transforming its economy and emergence as the world’s second-largest economy in a relatively short period of around three and a half decades—since the Open Door Policy was introduced in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping. New Delhi’s discomfiture is that this economic success has been achieved by a state calling itself a “socialist market economy.”
China’s creation of a new global financial architecture has as its foundation the New Development Bank, the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Silk Road Fund, and the South-South Cooperation Fund: structures that provide loans at attractive rates with long repayment schedules designed to remove the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Asian Development Fund from their erstwhile dominance in providing financial aid to developing countries.
President Joe Biden, left, participates in a virtual Quad Summit with Australia, India, and Japan Friday, March 12, 2021.
photo: Adam Schultz
Ships from the Indian and US navies, and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, maneuver into close formation during Exercise Malabar 2015.
photo: Stephane Belcher
Every hostile act by China—verbally, and in the maritime domain—empowers domestic political expressions in India that favor a tougher line to be adopted towards Beijing. Matters regarding how to handle an assertive China encourage the creation of a non-NATO with the Quad displaying the resolve to work together and check the ambitions of China. Political connectivity through annual defense and economic security summits, and a wide-ranging Strategic Economic Dialogue between the Quad members that implements agreements and can bring them to fruition are needed.
Bureaucracies Present Hurdle
Institutional actors within the respective Quad countries present the biggest hurdle to closer relations. The bureaucracies in Canberra, New Delhi, Tokyo, and Washington are known for their stonewalling and intransigence, and have put a damper on hopes, raised by political leadership, that the four countries might herald a new dawn in strategic relations benefiting the entire Indo-Pacific region.
An opening, revealing a bureaucratic thaw in Japan vis-à-vis India, was the India-Japan Agreement for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, signed in November 2016. For a conservative bureaucracy like Japan’s to sign an agreement with a nonNPT member like India on the nuclear issue was a revelation, taking into account the genuine domestic abhorrence of nuclear weapons and the criticism India faced in 1998 after conducting nuclear tests.
India has to look beyond existing paradigms if it is to actively participate in multilateral initiatives— economic and strategic—by anticipating conditions in the decades ahead. It must not be constrained by self-imposed limitations stemming from domestic inconsistencies, mostly political, preventing a crossparty vision of the country’s global role.
There is no altruism in international politics. After Xi Jinping celebrated the CCP centennial this July, the Quad members need to begin synchronizing their strategic objectives to keep the Asia-Pacific region a hub of innovation and trade, and not allow it to fall prey to centralization and ideological expressions that belong to another age.
Dr. Raviprasad Narayanan is associate professor at the Centre for East Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He can be reached at raviprasad.narayanan@gmail.com
