State of the Union: The Yanks are coming

The second term of any US President is a good time for intrepid and inspiring foreign policy enterprises. Free of electoral pressures, the President can make his own historical bed to lie in.

With less than two years for President Barack Obama’s term to wind down and a hostile Congress, will there be any legacy of the Indo-US relationship during the Obama years?

Mr Obama inherited a country in its severest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was mired in two wars. In the librettos of the US President, the good war was in Afghanistan and the bad war in Iraq.

Its reputation was in slivers due to the illegal renditions programme and prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay and other offsite locations.

How much of that damage has been repaired only time would tell. One of the inadvertent casualties of these preoccupations has been an absence of mind space for the Indo-US relationship.

Nothing evidences it more than two superb accounts of the priorities and primacies within the rarefied echelons of the US administration authored by two former US defence secretaries.

Robert Gates served both the Bush and the Obama administrations and Leon Panetta, who first served as Mr Obama’s Central Intelligence Agency director and then as secretary of defence. India hardly finds even a passing reference in both these narratives.

At this point, it perhaps would be worth to step back into time. In the closing years of the Vajpayee administration, the then National Democratic Alliance government initiated the “Next Steps in the Strategic Partnership (NSSP)” with the US.

The NSSP was the outcome of a rather capacious dialogue between Jaswant Singh and Strobe Talbott. However, the moment the Bharatiya Janata Party was out of government, it started opposing every aspect of the Indo-US engagement with vengeance.

The intransigence culminated in the confidence motion of 2008 on the Indo-US nuclear engagement that the NDA lost.

What the BJP/NDA opposed was perhaps the most “daring initiative” ever envisioned reform of the international nuclear order to India’s advantage. However, after this watershed achievement there has been a hiatus.

What should be the next “big idea” in this relationship? For that, one needs to scan the strategic landscape to discern the significant US initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region.

The most obvious one that comes to the mind is the “Asia pivot” or the rebalance of the US force posture towards the Asia-Pacific region.

This entails drawing down from Europe and the Greater Middle East and deploying those military forces in the ratio of 60-40 in this area.

Broadly quantified, it translates into 60 per cent of all oversees US military assets in the Asia-Pacific and 40 per cent in the rest of the world. Though there is an economic component to this rebalance but given the sluggish nature of the global economy it is at best fuzzy.

Does India fit into this strategic calculus? Unlikely, given the fact that India should maintain strategic ambivalence and not get tied down to any arrangement that would in any manner constrain its autonomy. The grandiloquent rhetoric about the quadrilateral between Japan, Australia, the US and India notwithstanding.

The next big item on the US calendar is the drawdown leading to the eventual wrap up of its involvement in Afghanistan. Were the security situation to deteriorate and the new power structure in Afghanistan is unable to hold the country together what then would the US do?

Would it recommit troops to Afghanistan? Again, this is exceedingly incongruous. Would it then look around at Afghanistan’s immediate neighbours Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and the Stans-Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to fill that vacuum? Not by a stretch, as some do not have the capacity, while others are players in the Afghan tragedy since the Eighties.

And others would be mortified of venturing back. Would then the US look towards India for fulfilling that role given that India has a strategic partnership with Afghanistan?

This is unlikely, since it would put Pakistan’s tail up and more so India has been chary for all the right reasons to having an expeditionary presence abroad.

An idea that has been flagged earlier too is perhaps worth cogitating. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) comes up for review this year. India has, perhaps, the most impeccable track record in terms of non-proliferation of nuclear technology perhaps much more than even the signatories to the treaty.

Would it be India’s interest to join the nuclear non-proliferation architecture as a nuclear weapon state? Should India not graduate into the role of a rule maker rather than a rule taker?

Is there any downside for India for aspiring to once again change the international order? Prima facie there seems to be none.

However, why would the US or anyone else for that matter do the heavy lifting for India? The US in any case feels shortchanged by the supplier’s liability provision in the nuclear liability act.

The collective belief among the Beltway policy community in Washington D.C. is that the US got literally nothing in return for all the muscle and torque it invested into getting India the waiver from its own legislature and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

The conundrum then is can India offer the US something in return? There are going to be no takers for the enhanced foreign direct investment (FDI) limit to 49 per cent in defence howsoever much the Indian government may want to spin it.

Maybe the government may not need to do a quid pro quo but pitch it dexterously. Approximating the United Nations Security Council, the NPT is also a vestige of power balance of the Cold War era. If the institutions of global governance have to reflect the contemporary global dynamic they need to reform too.

However, first and foremost the government needs to start a conversation within its own strategic and the policy community to flesh out the pros and cons of this thought.

Concurrently, it must explore the US administration’s attitude and that of other key nations. Mr Obama’s upcoming visit to India at the end of January is the opportune moment.

Does the BJP government have the strategic bandwidth to at least think large if not finesse this realpolitik? Indubitably, it is more creative than showing the Yanks some military hardware.
 
The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari