Indo-US relations maturing since the end of the Cold War which encompassed not only massive trade between the two but strategic cooperation in the fields of military interoperability and sharing of critical and emerging technologies without major hiccups have been put on a reverse gear by the US President Donald Trump with the imposition of 50 percent tariffs on Indian exports of goods to be effective from August 27. This was an unexpected move altering the assumptions of US foreign policy upside down. This has raised quandary among the Indian foreign policy makers and strategic experts who based India’s foreign policy responses to great power politics on the assumptions of the country’s geopolitical centrality to the US in containing the emerging hegemon in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, China.
India’s Foreign Policy Quandary
The US under President Trump has courted Pakistan and demonstrated the possibilities of bilateral financial gains between them to the utter dissatisfaction of Indian strategists and foreign policy makers. Some commentators believe that President Trump is endearing Pakistan for the simple reason that it unambiguously acknowledged the American role in putting an end to Indo-Pak military standoff in May this year and boastfully recommended Trump’s name for next Nobel prize for peace. To many Indians, the US’s such hardening approach comes as a surprise given the two countries under different previous regimes celebrated the natural bonding between the two democracies and almost all administrations including the Trump’s previous tenure underlined India’s geopolitical significance to the US in the Indo-Pacific region. This apart, the sheer market size that India provides being the largest populated country of the world had provided India the confidence that it would not suffer from economic alienation at least from champions of market economy such as the US.
India’s policy of multi-alignment has clearly failed to deliver results. New Delhi considered the policy course as the best way to maneuver between the great powers and serve its national interests in the post-Cold War era. As the policy of non-alignment failed to gain traction within the strategic community within India with the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, New Delhi forged a foreign policy course to build partnerships with all major powers across the ideological spectrum without getting into any formal alliance. The essence of non-alignment remained- strategic autonomy. With this foreign policy approach, India sought to navigate the intricacies of great power rivalries by simultaneously developing relationships with US, Russia and China not to aggravate their relations or to pit one against the other but to avoid dominance and hegemony in the South Asian and the Indo-Pacific region and fulfill its interests as a developing country.
US Poised to lose a Credible Partner
To avert Chinese dominance in these regions, India forged close strategic ties with the US whereas it did not want relationship with China to fall below a threshold by inviting excessive intervention by the US and thus it avoided formal alliance with the US. However, India was always ready to put its weight behind the US whenever China would have crossed the redlines and pursued military domination of the regions. Much in a similar vein, India would have courted the US, had Russia pursued similar policies in these regions. So far as India does not perceive serious security threats in these regions, it tries to fulfill its interests as a developing economy. All the previous US administrations tolerated such nuances in India’s foreign policy approach and believed it could be a credible partner in containing Chinese hegemony. President Trump during his second term in office has declared the great power rivalries dead. He is looking ahead for a successful trade deal with China. To him, China with its reserves of rare-earth minerals, superiority in the area of technology, economic size and outputs and leverages over supply chains is far more significant for the US than India. Similarly, while punishing India with tariffs for purchasing Russian oil, Trump believes he can broker Russia-Ukraine peace deal by directly talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin. By jettisoning the great power rivalries, Trump has made India’s foreign policy course of multi-alignment ineffective. On the other side, his unconventional approach is poised to strengthen China in the South Asian and Indo-Pacific regions. India has no other options left except further strengthening its multi-alignment foreign policy course. It will not only look to strengthen ties with Russia and China but diversify military and security ties with Japan, Australia, Britain, South Korea and European Union apart from multilateral groupings of Global South. India will have to focus more on developing into a self-reliant economy in order to insulate itself from mercurial Trump administration and vagaries of great power rivalries. But Trump’s conceptual rejection of great power rivalries does not end the rivalries on the ground. Once, China becomes further emboldened with the weakening of partners in the Indo-Pacific such as India and Japan, the US as well as India will have tougher time to deal with such predicament. While imposing massive tariffs against India as well as other countries, the current administration in the US ignored the fact that low-income Americans spend a lion share of their income on imported goods and industries that employ manual workers depend on imported inputs and moreover, the incomes of farmers and cattlemen are prone to tariff retaliation by other countries. The Trump administration 2.0 showed little regard as regards India’s relevance to its strategic planning much before the imposition of tariffs when it sent back Indian immigrants back home in February this year on the grounds they overstayed beyond permissible limits without waiting for a diplomatic solution. The US needs to ponder over the fact that it has been technology rather than trade and migration which has led to more retrenchment and unemployment in the US. The Trump administration has risked alienating a credible trade and security partner with the largest market in the world in favor of relationships with powers with revisionist ambitions along with their anti-western legacy. Their technological superiority has perhaps swayed Trump’s perspective. However, it is not a far away possibility when Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be displacing American workers including skilled ones.
0 Comments
LEAVE A COMMENT
Your email address will not be published