Containing China

US diplomatic support of India’s quest for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and American acceptance of Indian aspirations to be taken seriously as a first-rank great power appealed greatly to Indians who have often felt slighted by the greater attention paid to China. And there was the incentive of additional state-of-the-art American military technology. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems certain that by late last year the list already included the Patriot anti-missile defence system, f-16 fighters, p-3c Orion maritime surveillance planes, c-130 stretched medium-lift transport aircraft, Perry-class frigates, and Sea Hawk helicopters. The US was also offering training in carrier operations for the Indian pilots who will be flying from India’s new full-size aircraft carriers starting in 2008, access to America’s next-generation Joint Strike Fighter when it becomes available, and an end to the ban on exports of American civil nuclear technology for India’s ambitious nuclear power program.

It was a tempting package, but there was one enormous drawback. A close India-US alliance, combined with an upgrade program for the Indian armed forces, was bound to alarm China, and could easily drive it into both an arms race and confrontation with the US-allied countries that sought to encircle it. If that happened, India would have lost far more than it gained. How could sane, moderate leaders like Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi justify taking such a risk?

Arrogance, overconfidence, hubris. “India knows what it is doing,” assured Prem Shankar Jha, former editor of the Hindustan Times, citing confidential sources close to Singh. “It is not going to make China an enemy.” And that is no doubt exactly what India’s leaders believe: that they can get what they want from those clumsy Americans without letting Washington manoeuvre them into a confrontation with China. They are smarter, more sophisticated, and they can manage China’s reaction. The arrogance of Washington’s neo-conservatives has found its natural partner in the overconfidence of New Delhi’s politicians and strategists, and the whole world may have reason to regret it.

The formal US-India deal probably could have been signed by late 2004 but it languished as the White House was preoccupied with the US presidential election, and because India was holding out for unprecedented co-production deals in the weapons systems Washington was offering. It was not until March 25, 2005, in a briefing now famous in India, that a US State Department spokesman declared that President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had “developed the outline for a decisively broader strategic relationship.”

When Rice travelled to New Delhi a few days later, Singh was told that Washington wanted to “help India become a major world power in the twenty-first century,” and the State Department briefer who accompanied her emphasized that Washington “understands fully the implications, including the military implications, of that statement.” Meanwhile, the Indian Communists were being whipped into line with the argument that if they brought the Congress government down over its American policy, it would put the crypto-fascists of the bjp back into power, and then they would conclude an alliance with the Americans.

The deal was about to be consummated—and suddenly China woke up. There seems little doubt that Beijing had been asleep at the switch, broadly aware that the US was trying to lure India into an alliance but ignorant of how far matters had advanced. So Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s scheduled swing through South Asia abruptly took on a new goal: to dissuade New Delhi from signing up with Washington. He reached New Delhi on April 10, bearing a number of gifts and proposals for India: an offer of a free-trade area between the two countries, an official Chinese map that for the first time showed the tiny Himalayan state of Sikkim as Indian territory, and (according to one usually reliable Indian source) a proposed swap of disputed territories along the western and eastern sections of the border between India and Tibet, the scenes of the clash in 1962, that would have ended the border quarrel in one fell swoop.

It was too little, too late. India pocketed the map, agreed to open discussions on a free trade area, and refused the swap. Wen and Singh signed an “Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the Boundary Question,” and a “Protocol on Modalities for the Implementation of Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field along the Line of Actual Control in the China-India Border Areas,” among other deals, and declared that the two countries were establishing “a strategic and co-operative partnership for peace and prosperity.” But for all the windy rhetoric, Wen went home with nothing to show for his efforts on the real issue. It’s not known if the blossoming Indo-US alliance was even formally discussed by the two leaders, and India certainly did not change course. Two months later, on June 28, Indian defence minister Mukherjee flew to Washington to sign a ten-year agreement on military co-operation and joint weapons production.

“The United States and India have entered a new era,” said the joint statement by Mukherjee and Rumsfeld, and that is unquestionably true. What kind of era it will be, however, is another question entirely. India will play its hand as best it can, but the outcome will depend mainly on how deeply the American policy establishment is committed to “the notion of the United States remaining the world’s sole military superpower until the end of time” (as Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University put it), and on whether the Chinese policy establishment can remain calm as it sees the ring of American alliances closing in around it.

The US strategy would be less worrisome if it were only the handiwork of a band of neo-conservatives who have gained power in Washington at a time when the American military appears unchallengeable. Nemesis already stalks their ill-advised military adventure in the Gulf, and if they were mere mavericks one could reasonably expect that their disgrace over the Iraq fiasco would put an end to their less visible, but ultimately more dangerous, project of creating a neo-nato around China. Unfortunately, they are not alone.

From the beginning of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union unexpectedly thrust the US into the role of the world’s sole superpower, the bipartisan response in Washington has been a determination to perpetuate that exalted status indefinitely. That led to an urgent search for new rivals whose “threat” could be used to justify to the American public the level of military expenditure needed to maintain that status, and a growing tendency to rely on the unilateral exercise of American military power rather than submit to the constraints of international law. It was Bill Clinton who declared in February 1998 (in reference to Iraq’s refusal to allow United Nations weapons inspectors into the country) that “the US and hopefully all our allies have the unilateral right to respond at a time, place, and manner of our own choosing.”