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America’s Bad Bet on India

New Delhi Won’t Side With Washington Against
Beijing
BY ASHLEY J. TELLIS May 1, 2023
ASHLEY J. TELLIS is the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.

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

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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.

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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,

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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

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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.

India’s priority has been to receive American assistance in building up its

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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

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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

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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.

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

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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.
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