Several academics and scholars in India and the United States echo Washington’s unease with New Delhi and Moscow’s bilateral relations. If one went solely by these commentaries, published consistently over the last two years, one could conclude that India was Russia’s only partner besides China. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil, and a host of Sub-Saharan African nations have good ties with Russia, with same or even treaty-level ties with the US.
Many comparisons have been drawn between India’s engagement with Russia and the US. But few of the academics and analysts making such comparisons have focused on the United States’ engagement with India versus other nations. Among these voices is Rajesh Rajagopalan, who, in his recent op-ed for ThePrint, drew parallels between Jawaharlal Nehru’s decision to not side with the US against China in the early years of post-colonial India, and emphasised Modi’s current balancing act with Russia and the US.
He made the argument that “neither being a 5,000-year-old civilisation nor a rising power precludes strategic foolishness” and went on to lament the limits of what he deemed a “transactional” relationship between the US and India.
“In the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Russia, several American officials, both current and former, have publicly expressed displeasure at New Delhi’s continued dalliance with Moscow,” wrote Rajagopalan. Different versions of this sentence have found their place in Western and Indian press in the last two years. Based on the author’s fealties, either an argument calling for the abandonment of ties with Russia or a history lesson going back to 1971 on Cold War era partnerships would follow suit. This vicious cycle hinders the growth of the bilateral partnership. But there is another way to look at the US-India-Russia triangle.
One must start by asking the question, “Is India the only nation to have strong ties with both Russia and the US?”
Rajagopalan’s hindsight is 20/20.
India’s balancing act between the US and Russia continues under Modi, but Washington’s “us versus them” approach to foreign affairs also persists. In the 1950s, it was American politician John Foster Dulles quoting Winston Churchill’s line, “I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire and the fire brigade”, to urge Indians to side with the US against the Soviets.
These moral grandstanding gestures seem to be reserved for India. From American diplomats to think tankers in Washington to a Joe who read the headlines on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, everyone takes a holier-than-thou approach to New Delhi’s relations with Moscow.
Economic realities more important
What has changed since the Cold War era is the rest of the world. We no longer live in a unipolar or bipolar world, particularly in the economic sphere. We live in a multipolar, globalised world wherein a chip that powers your microwave machine sources its raw materials from over 15 nations—some allies, some adversaries and many neutral.
Economic realities make it difficult for nations to jump on bandwagons based on arbitrary values, or, in this case, geopolitical rivalries. Economies that do not have an appetite for war but only for development, look to diplomacy, particularly at the bilateral level. A case in point is Vietnam’s engagement with China. Closer home, see the Indian Army’s 21 rounds of talks with its Chinese counterparts on the border dispute, or in latest news, the Indian business sector approaching the government with requests for joint ventures with Chinese companies. Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian fighter jet did not totally derail its relationship with Russia, ironically expanding bilateral trade.
Washington has not engaged in public trials of its partners’ bilateral relationships. As a matter of fact, the US is considering increasing nuclear cooperation with Turkey.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made several controversial statements over the years, most recently on the US’ position on the Israel-Palestine issue. Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad has a similar track record of engaging in virulent antisemitism and racism, from attributing the Asian Financial crisis to the Jewish community in the late 1990s to his racism toward Tamils in Malaysia. These do not come to paint the bilateral partnership of the US and Malaysia or the US and Turkey. On the contrary, Intel has doubled down on its investments in Malaysia, and Washington continues to supply Turkey with F16s—a top 10 trading partner of Russia, both before and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
If there are any lessons from Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it would be that overreliance on a nation for vital supplies does not bode well when in crisis. Rajagopalan claims that a transactional relationship would imply the US seek strong defence partnerships elsewhere.
They rightly should.
India lifts its own weight
India may not necessarily want to become a Japan, South Korea, The Philippines or one of the NATO countries to the US. But it is for good reason. India lifts its own weight. Transforming it into a state dependent on another faraway partner for support may not pan out in the 21st century, when realism and restraint drive foreign policy over liberal internationalist idealism.
Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not all European nations stepped up their defence spending to three per cent of their GDP. Given India’s security environment, it cannot afford to outsource its security nor rest in complacency as some nations with defence treaties with the US have done. Besides, the political environment in Washington may not encourage that lethargy.
The prospect of a second Donald Trump administration gives more reason for realist foreign policy. If the early messages by Trump and the Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance—an open advocate for restraint—are any indication, their administration would not have America as the policeman of the world. They would rather have it engage in more transactional foreign affairs. While a second Joe Biden administration may not be as withdrawn from international conflicts as a Trump administration, it would continue to be less idealistic. See its withdrawal from Afghanistan and aversion to multilateral trade blocs such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CP-TPP).
Over the last few years, American businesses have moved a part of their operations out of China into friendly shores such as Vietnam, Thailand and even India. These supply chain diversification initiatives, while accelerated for supply chain resiliency reasons in the last few years, are almost always driven by macroeconomic factors and political stability over the nation’s type of governance or their society’s internal dynamics.
With the new challenges stemming from trade tariffs, bans and export restrictions, the Biden administration is starting to wrestle with the complexity of global supply chains, the challenges in enforcing country of origin regulations on these new shores, and as a result, in decoupling in an interconnected world. As nations in the so-called ‘Global South’ seek partnerships and memberships in global groupings such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) for economic and developmental reasons, most, if not all, of Washington’s relationships could one day transform into transactional ones. Is the US going to trade and share technology only with nations that choose it over the others? Washington is known to formulate foreign policies for the near term, but even the most short-sighted international relations experts cannot dismiss the growing significance of the non-aligned ‘Global South’, particularly in multilateral fora.
In this global environment, India’s realpolitik of multi-alignment is not foolishness but a prudent grand strategy for the emerging multipolar world order.
Akhil Ramesh is Director of the India Program and Economic Statecraft Initiative at Pacific Forum. He can be reached at akhil@pacforum.org. Views are personal.
Rajesh Rajagopalan’s response
A realist foreign policy should begin with a clear understanding of the distribution of material power, even if this is not always determinate. Such an assessment would suggest that the world is bipolar, not multipolar. India, with a GDP about a fifth of China’s, is not a polar power; neither is Russia, with a GDP that is half of India’s. It’s not clear how India can magically ‘lift its own weight’ given this inequality, especially considering its rather low defence spending.
It is possible that Indian cleverness will allow it to counter China by itself despite such gross disparities, but it is a risky bet, especially considering that India’s repeated outreach to China since 2014 has borne little fruit. Warning of the possible dangers of this choice, as I did in my essay, appears entirely reasonable. Partnering with others does not mean a formal security alliance like NATO either, but it does mean a greater willingness to focus on security cooperation with willing partners. Any risk arising from this has to be set against the risk of standing alone, especially since India has made that choice in the past and suffered for it.
The idea that the ‘Global South’ or BRICS+ matter in dealing with India’s China problem is quaint. If anything, they are more likely to partner with the richer, more authentically anti-Western China than India, though they are irrelevant either way. Equally, trade is not a particularly relevant indicator of political futures, as India’s or even the West’s trade relations with China over the last few decades have amply demonstrated. Multi-alignment with a lot of weak partners is like whistling in the dark: it may reduce your trembling but it will not be of much help should you have to face the dragon.
Rajesh Rajagopalan is a professor of International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He tweets @RRajagopalanJNU. Views are personal.
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