President Barack Obama is well on the way to scoring a significant foreign policy win in India tempering his struggles in relations with Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya.
In a rare honor, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address a joint session of Congress on June 8 at the end of a visit that starts on June 6. He will meet Obama for the seventh time and their relaxed personal relationship has become a factor in disarming traditional Indian reluctance to forge a closer relationship with Washington.
Warming ties with India would help the US to redefine balances of power in Asia among India, Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Washington wants India to be a reliable US-friendly naval and diplomatic power to countervail China which many see as a growing threat to American interests and allies in the Pacific, North and South China Seas and Indian Ocean.
India may never become a US ally like Australia but the power equations would certainly change in the region if the current friendly trends continue. Modi’s visit and his address to Congress will set the tone.
For decades, India was distrustful of the US and leaned towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War. President Bill Clinton made the first determined overtures to win over India and President George W. Bush paved the way for a strategic partnership.
He pushed legislation through Congress in 2008 allowing India to trade in nuclear fuel and technology for peaceful purposes despite its refusal to enter the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The deal leaves India’s military nuclear programs unhindered.
Washington also persuaded the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group to waive its ban on nuclear trade placed after India tested its first atomic weapon in 1974. Delhi now wants to be accepted as a full member allowing it all privileges as a civilian nuclear power.
The US is trying to help but in exchange India is expected to buy six nuclear energy power plants from Westinghouse Electric, reportedly adding to its 21 indigenously developed plants and two made by Russia’s Rosatom.
India has very little indigenous oil and is regularly buffeted by the ups and downs of oil prices. It would like to use nuclear power for 25% of its electricity by 2050.
Modi’s 2014 assumption of power in Delhi convinced Washington that the best window in half a century had opened to draw India into stable economic and military relationships capable of helping Washington to contain China and change regional equations of power. But winning Delhi required downgrading its long-standing intimacy with India’s arch-enemy Pakistan.
A new opportunity crystallized after Washington’s 2015 agreement with Tehran to lift some economic sanctions in exchange for dismantling programs that might have allowed Iran to build nuclear weapons.
That allowed Washington to quietly encourage Modi to cooperate with Iran as part of a new strategic approach towards trade in the region and increased vigilance over the Indian Ocean. Obama is taking a risk with those in Washington who want to keep Iran isolated but seems to trust India enough to help wean Tehran away from extremism by bringing it into new regional networks of trade helpful to the wider US need to constrain an increasingly assertive China from military adventurism.
Motivations included the need to make it unnecessary for any regional player to depend on Pakistan, which is now a very close economic and military friend of China. It is also a politically unstable country that some see as a nearly failed state mired in an existential struggle with Islamic jihadists including the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
With US support, Modi visited Tehran in late May to sign agreements with President Hassan Rouhani and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to develop Iran’s Chabahar harbor and a trade corridor through Afghanistan to Central Asia.
India has committed to providing $500 million in the first phase to expand and upgrade harbor facilities and raise up to $16 billion for the trade corridors. Much of the technology and work is likely to come from India and will help to significantly boost Indian industrial capacities.
If completed, these developments will significantly reinforce the US Navy’s position in the Indian Ocean through closer collaboration with the Indian Navy. Above all, the Iranian port under Indian influence would serve to offset an emerging naval threat from China in the Indian Ocean that is causing much apprehension in Washington.
The threat stems from a 2013 Chinese deal with Pakistan to develop a $46 billion economic, trade and military transport corridor from China to Gwadar port, which would give the Chinese navy a very significant foothold in the Indian Ocean. China’s military would also get strong footholds inside Pakistan through weapons sales and joint exercises. Chinese battleships and submarines already visit an exclusive base in the Gwadar port area.
The distance between Chabahar and Gwadar is just 72 nautical miles by sea and 353km by road. Both are on the Arabian Sea in the Gulf of Oman, which is the entrance to the very heavily used and strategic Persian Gulf.
Gwadar is in Baluchistan, one of Pakistan’s most unstable provinces with a long history of disaffection with Punjabi Pakistanis who dominate Islamabad. Baluchistan is also being used by the Afghan Taliban as a safe haven for attacks inside Afghanistan.
Islamabad is using Chinese support as a bargaining chip with Washington to retain hold on US financial and military aid, which is at risk because of Washington’s increasing disenchantment with Pakistan.
The disenchantment is caused mainly by the safe havens that the Pakistani army still provides to the extremist Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan despite the manifest harm to American forces in the region and Washington’s very expensive efforts to stabilize the Afghan government.
In effect, the Chabahar deal places Islamabad on notice that India is encircling Pakistan by developing close economic partnerships, supported by Washington, with Iran and Afghanistan. It tells Beijing that Delhi cannot be brushed aside in the region because it is now leans willingly towards the US as a friend.
The past year brought signal changes in Washington’s views. It realized that India has the political and democratic maturity to be a reliable partner, despite its bewildering domestic politics, bureaucratic sloth and numerous social and economic troubles.
It also realized that neither Pakistan’s politicians nor the army are obedient executors of Washington’s desires despite the nearly $80 billion it has spent over the past 30 years to buy their loyalty. The army also remains riddled with jihadist sympathizers.
The best outcomes would include acceptance by Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, China and India that region-wide friendship and collaboration on trade and economic issues offer viable paths out of grave local perils.
Those include the wars that have devastated Afghanistan for more than 40 years; India’s 1962 and 1967 wars with China and numerous border skirmishes; Pakistan’s three wars with India and use of jihadists to destabilize Kashmir; and the anti-Indian fervor that has held Pakistani prosperity down for nearly all its existence, reducing it to an almost failed state.
The wiser choice for Pakistan would be to moderate its hostility and share in the fruits of economic and trade growth fueled by India in the region. Or it could enter China’s sphere of influence by siding more closely with Beijing despite Washington’s sharp disapproval.
Pakistan can greatly enhance its own economic and trade prospects by entering both the Chabahar and Gwadar camps. But it would have to renounce some of its anti-Indian military collaboration with China while preventing the Afghan Taliban from using safe havens inside Pakistan to create havoc in Afghanistan.
Modi’s address to Congress may trigger some of these possibilities by tying India more closely to the family of US-led democracies.
photo credit: Narendra Modi via photopin (license)