Tilting towards Washington, has India’s time over China come?
- New Delhi is displacing Beijing in the American hierarchy of bilateral relations as the White House reverses decades of Sino-US engagement
- The two Asian giants are struggling to manage their differences and show few signs of wanting to improve ties
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Then last week Kurt Campbell, US President Joe Biden’s top official for the Indo-Pacific region, described India as “one of the most sought-after players on the global stage” and hailed the US-India ties as “the most important bilateral relationship on the planet”.
For decades, US presidents and top officials had called Washington’s ties with Beijing the most important and consequential bilateral relationship in the world.
Campbell’s comments mark a milestone shift in US foreign policy priorities, which have reversed dramatically from the engagement since the early 1970s to a cold war-style containment strategy to curb China’s rise.
Speaking alongside Modi at the White House three weeks ago, Biden, who has personally witnessed the rise and fall of the engagement strategy over the past five decades, made it clear that his foreign policy was values driven.
“One of the fundamental reasons that I believe the US-China relationship is not in the space it is with the US-Indian relationship is that there’s an overwhelming respect for each other because we’re both democracies,” the US leader said.
But that does not mean Washington and New Delhi see eye to eye on many critical issues, such as India’s human rights abuses, its refusal to condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and Washington’s security ties with Delhi’s arch-rival Islamabad.
Aside from the China factor, what matters most in Delhi’s strategic pivot towards Washington seems to be the US assurance that it will not lecture India over its ties with Russia.
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“We are investing in a relationship that we are not going to judge by one issue, even if that issue is quite consequential, but rather that we are going to judge over the fullness of time, as we try to work on convergence on the major strategic questions facing our two countries,” US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in June last year.
“On one of those questions, how to deal with the challenge posed by China, there is much more convergence today and that is important to US foreign policy.”
With that in mind, Washington has pledged to support Delhi in its border dispute with Beijing regardless, which will no doubt constrain China’s options in seeking a way out of the tense border situation.
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The absence of a Chinese ambassador in Delhi has made it even more difficult for both sides to manage their differences.
With Delhi set to displace Beijing in Washington’s hierarchy of external relations and the US offering support to help India’s rise – support that may be comparable to that provided by Washington to Beijing over the years – India’s time may have finally come, as Modi and other analysts have repeatedly proclaimed.
Delhi may not want to be part of “any kind of ‘containment’ of China”, according to former Indian foreign secretary Shyam Saran, but there is no denying about the intensifying rivalry between China and India.
Both countries aspire to become a regional and even global superpower, and Delhi is set to rise to become a foremost geopolitical rival for Beijing in the many years and decades to come. Could this be a Thucydides Trap between China and India in the making?
