In February this year, a group of eight distinguished Indian thinkers -- Sunil Khilnani, Rajiv Kumar, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Prakash Menon, Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan, Shyam Saran and Siddharth Varadarajan -- had collaborated in preparing a seventy-page paper titled NONALIGNMENT 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twentyfirst Century. Its express objective is to promote a national consensus in support of a new version of nonalignment as the optimum grand strategy for a rising India.
Ashley J Tellis, Senior Associate, South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, has just published a perceptive and constructive critique of this paper, titled, NONALIGNMENT REDUX: The Perils of Old Wine in New Skins.
Its impeccable logic is arresting.
His long persuasive essay can be read at
http://carnegieendowment.org/2012/07/10 ... skins/co13#
SOME EXCERPTS
As Nonalignment 2.0 declares plainly, “China will, for the foreseeable future, remain a significant foreign policy and security challenge for India. It is the one major power which impinges directly on India’s geopolitical space. As its economic and military capabilities expand, its power differential with India is likely to widen” (Para 26). Given this prognosis, the report soberly concludes that “India’s China strategy has to strike a careful balance between cooperation and competition, economic and political interests, bilateral and regional contexts. Given the current and future asymmetries in capabilities and influence between India and China, it is imperative that we get this balance right. This is perhaps the single most important challenge for Indian strategy in the years ahead” (Para 41, emphasis added).
The discussion pertaining to Pakistan endorses what the Indian armed forces have already begun to do with varying degrees of visibility: planning for operations that emphasize “the employment of cyber and/or air power in a punitive mode” (Para 170) at the lower end of the war-fighting spectrum as well as “shallow thrusts [by land forces] that are defensible in as many areas as feasible along the International Border and the LoC [Line of Control]” (Para 169) at the higher end
But the report’s suggestions in regard to China are both novel and creative. On the assumption that China’s military advantages over India along the Himalayas will continue to grow, the document reiterates that New Delhi’s strategy should aim solely at “the restoration of [the] status quo ante” (Para 173) in the event of conflict. However, in a sharp departure from the current strategy of forward defense simpliciter, the report advocates a more complex concept of operations that is centered on “limited tactical offensives” intended to underwrite local “land-grabs” for purposes of securing an advantageous position in post-conflict negotiations. This “strategy of quid pro quo” would require the Indian military to support insurgencies in Indian territories overrun by Chinese forces as a means of wearing them down, to interdict the Chinese logistics and operational infrastructure in Tibet through direct and standoff means, and “to dominate the Indian Ocean region” through naval power as the final prong in an “asymmetric strategy” (Paras 174‒177) toward China. Although some of these elements may seem overly provocative—for example, the report is ambiguous about whether India should support anti-Chinese insurgencies only in its lost territories or in Tibet proper as well—they represent in their totality a new way of thinking about the challenges of securing the Sino-Indian border, in contrast to most traditional discussions, which are sterile and uninspired.
Implementing the innovations suggested with regard to both Pakistan and China will require not just improvements in material capability, but also larger transformations in military and higher defense organization paired with fundamental changes in strategic culture. The report summarizes some of the major changes necessary in regard to organization, such as the need for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, integrated theater and functional commands, and reforms in the Ministry of Defense. These have been much discussed in India in recent years.
What has not received focused attention, however, are the changes necessary in India’s nuclear capabilities and posture in the face of the growing threats posed by China and Pakistan. Nonalignment 2.0 engages this problem at length, even if at the cost of depth, by emphasizing the need for “hardening and survivability of [the] arsenal,” ensuring “an assured second-strike capability” through “the development of the maritime leg of [India’s] nuclear capability and the accompanying command and control systems,” and “work[ing] towards the operationalization of [the country’s] missile defense capabilities” (Para 238). The report’s most important contribution, however, can be found in its discussion of the Indian response to nuclear terrorism. Here, it argues that the currently “stated nuclear doctrine needs to be amended to affirm [both] the responsibility of the state from which nuclear weapons or material[s] [originate or] may be stolen” and India’s willingness “to act on strong but less than perfect information.” Such a modification of standing policy is held to be desirable because it “would help [to] disabuse any state of the notion that it can claim helplessness in preventing theft of material or warheads” (Para 240).
While Nonalignment 2.0, on balance, makes vital contributions to the ongoing Indian debate about national security and offers many cogent ideas for better protecting the state, it shies away from frontally addressing the crucial challenge of India’s strategic culture: namely, whether the country possesses the appropriate “substantive rationality” necessary to prosper in a competitive global system. Whether India possesses “a corporatist commitment to the production of wealth and power” and, by implication, can “respond successfully to the structural constraints to dominate in international politics” is still an open question. On this vexed issue, the report reflects the ambivalence still pervasive in India and offers the mystifying notion that India’s “power has often been the power of its example” (Para 20)—a claim that, even if true, offers little insight into how India ought to attempt to shape the world to suit its interests.
The discussion of national security in Nonalignment 2.0 concludes with a brutally honest assessment of internal problems. Since domestic threats remain almost as demanding as external challenges, it is not surprising that the report devotes an entire chapter to this issue. What will be startling to even the most casual reader, however, is the incredibly candid discussion of India’s failings as a democratic polity, and of the contribution these shortcomings have made toward subverting Indian security. While many discussions of internal security in India are quick to place blame at the feet of its troublesome neighbors—and there is plenty of culpability that can be attributed to Pakistan today and to China in the past—Nonalignment 2.0 chooses to cast its gaze resolutely inward, focusing on how the deficits of Indian democracy have created many of the conditions that provoke internal instability, some of which are then exploited by ill-intentioned bystanders.
For all the criticisms of Nonalignment 2.0, a close perusal of its text suggests that it contains all the building blocks for a sensible Indian grand strategy. Given the circumstances that India faces and the opportunities it has available thanks to two decades of economic reform, it is indeed fitting that the report focuses overwhelmingly on the need for India to defeat its developmental problems if it is to realize its dream of taking a place at the high table of international politics. Soaring and sustained levels of economic growth for a long period of time—as China has demonstrated since 1978—remain the only instrument by which India will be inexorably transformed into a great power. Only then can New Delhi position itself as an effective pole in the Asian geopolitical balance and receive international attention as a strategic entity of global significance. That Nonalignment 2.0 issues a clarion call for such performance to be attained through deepened interdependence and globalization—rather than through any attempt at refurbishing the failed autarky of the past—deserves clear and unstinting praise.
The report’s appropriately expansive treatment of national security covers a vast terrain that includes engaging the key strategic arenas that most impact India’s well-being, building its military capabilities to cope with both external and internal threats, and addressing the disfigurements of Indian democracy that breed its internal security problems. It should not be surprising that in a report covering such diverse issues, some of the analysis and recommendations will be queried, contested, and even opposed. But the overall effort, because of its cogency and its internal logic, deserves the commendation that its critics have failed to bestow.
As a proposed grand strategy for India, Nonalignment 2.0 clearly has many often-underappreciated strengths. It provides a penetrating analysis of India’s current circumstances and its three main strategic challenges: the necessity of expanding national power through economic growth achieved via intensified global integration; the imperative of remedying India’s internal weaknesses through both economic instruments and democratic renewal; and, finally, the need to prepare seriously for the divergent threats posed by China and Pakistan. With regard to these virtues, however, the document still falls short—less in its understanding of how the emerging global milieu affects India, and more in its prescriptions for how India ought to conduct itself in order to be successful in that environment. For a document on grand strategy, this is indeed a major shortcoming.
While the suggestion that India’s international influence would derive primarily from its example is perhaps overstated, the second and more problematic conclusion in Nonalignment 2.0 is that “nonalignment” remains the best organizing principle for India’s relations with the world in the years ahead. The resurrection of this term has obviously raised many hackles, but the problems associated with nonalignment go beyond the semantic issues that most Indian and foreign commentators have latched onto thus far. Indeed, the term is anachronistic, but even worse, it is fundamentally misconceived and downright dangerous, even in its new guise of “strategic autonomy.”
The report’s defense of nonalignment as an enduring solution to India’s strategic predicament is awkward because it not only conflates ends and means, but also excises from the original idea of nonalignment that which was most distinctive about its content. A simple analysis of state aims in international politics will establish this fact. In the competitive arena of interstate relations, all constituent entities invariably pursue—at a minimum—two vital but interrelated aims: protecting physical security and safeguarding decisional autonomy. The goal of protecting physical security becomes the essential precondition for achieving all other objectives because the international political environment is characterized by the absence of any overarching authority and the prospect of ever-present harm. Consequently, all states seek to protect their territory, resources, and population from predation by near and distant enemies. But they also seek to preserve their political autonomy just as zealously, because if they did not, they might end up protecting their physical security by foregoing their freedom. Because this trade-off is ordinarily unacceptable to any state, every entity in a competitive international system seeks, to the degree it can, to safeguard both its physical security and its decisional autonomy simultaneously.
The desirability of nonalignment as a strategic policy for India is particularly unsettling because it runs counter to exactly the conclusion that stems from the analysis in Nonalignment 2.0 if the report is taken at face value. The document clearly describes the present international system as one where high and growing levels of economic interdependence coexist with continuing strategic competition among key states. One such entity, China, is not only benefiting dramatically from its deeper integration with the global economy, but is also using this assimilation to directly expand its military capabilities and widen its power differential vis-à-vis India. Beijing, as the report transparently acknowledges, poses a dangerous security threat to New Delhi—a challenge that will only intensify because China’s continuing higher growth rates will provide it with greater resources for military purposes than India’s economy will in comparison.
As it turns out, China’s impressive economic performance also poses significant threats to the United States for the same reasons it threatens India. To China, the United States—and, to a much lesser degree, India—poses unsettling hazards to its security and standing. The United States perceives the same emerging threats in the Asia-Pacific and globally as does India. But in contrast to its relationship with China, the United States not only views India as embodying no dangers to its own interests, it actually seeks to build Indian power as part of a larger strategy of mitigating the Chinese challenge. In such circumstances, “given that India has more interests in ‘direct’ competition with China, and less with the United States,” it might be reasonable to conclude that Washington would be the more desirable and “likely alliance partner” for New Delhi. But, in a surprising twist, Nonalignment 2.0 declares that “this conclusion would be premature” (Para 131). It steers away from an affiliation, counseling that “both India and the United States may be better served by being friends rather than allies,” at least for now (Para 133).
This verdict is at odds with the report’s own analysis of the challenge. Clearly, the strategic threats posed by a fast-growing Chinese economy arise because the globalized economic system in which China is embedded produces differential returns for each of its participants. In the purely economic realm, these variations in returns do not matter because security competition is not at issue and any absolute gains accruing to trading states—no matter how varied their level—are better than foregoing those gains by eschewing trade. However, even trading states are embedded in a competitive political universe, so the variations in the gains from economic cooperation become significant. States that enjoy superior returns could apply those resources to producing military instruments, enabling them to threaten the security of other countries, including their trading partners. The potential victims could respond to this danger by opting out of economic cooperation with their geopolitical rivals or by attempting to prevent their rivals from participating in the generalized system of economic cooperation. Opting out is often self-defeating, since it may depress the growth rates of the potential victims without constraining the growth of the potential assailants who could continue to trade with others. Attempting to limit rivals’ participation is difficult because it could wreck the larger rules-based trading regime. Thus, the only sure recipe for strategic success in any environment where economic interdependence coexists with political competition is to forge tightly nested partnerships among friends and allies so as to enable these states to maximize their gains relative to the rest of the system, including their adversaries.
Nonalignment 2.0’s analysis of India’s strategic circumstances, therefore, should lead New Delhi directly into preferential strategic partnerships with the “enemies of its enemies.” Such affiliations, manifested through high-quality trading ties, robust defense cooperation, and strong (even if only tacit) diplomatic collaboration, could limit the dangers posed by India’s challengers, such as China. Alternatively, such partnerships could force challengers into enhanced cooperation with New Delhi because of the challengers’ fear that India’s partnerships with others might impose greater constraints on them than they would prefer.
Oddly, however, the report goes in exactly the opposite direction, running away from preferential partnerships in a chimerical quest for strategic autonomy. The obsession with nonalignment thus arises from a fundamental misreading of what success requires when political competition coexists with economic interdependence. By so doing, Nonalignment 2.0 fails to appreciate the central paradox of our times: Strategic autonomy is best achieved through a set of deep strategic partnerships among friends and allies.
The problem with nonalignment as a solution, therefore, is not so much semantic—though the term is admittedly grating to many in India and abroad—but rather that it is an inadequate, even misconceived, device for protecting Indian security in exactly those circumstances that are otherwise so well described in Nonalignment 2.0. Because it does not recognize this fact, the report ends up tying itself in knots when discussing India’s strategic relationships.
It begins by arguing that “the structures of competition in the global system will present India with a range of partnership choices” (Para 123) but fails to affirm that if the competitive environment described by the report is true, India will not have a choice of whether to pursue meaningful strategic partnerships. In other words, India will lack the luxury of “allying with none.”26 More to the point, however, the assessment that India will confront “a range of partnership choices” obscures the reality that not all these alternatives will in fact be equal. For example, in choosing between the United States and China—the great binary that dominates the discussion in the “Partnerships in a Global Context” section of the report (Paras 122‒137)—India will find its interests better served by a closer compact with Washington than with Beijing, simply on the strength of the report’s own analysis of the threats confronting New Delhi. In fact, a special partnership with the United States would likely open up a wider array of consociational possibilities for India, especially in East Asia and in Europe, both because friendship with Washington increases the comfort of many allies with New Delhi and because American support will assist India in consolidating its own power and autonomy.
Nonalignment 2.0 finds it difficult to affirm these conclusions transparently, even if it occasionally lurches toward them. This is partly because of the deep Indian psychological attachment to being geopolitically unfettered, but it is also due to a faulty and incomplete analytical framework in the document. For example, the report does not start by asking the key question of whether India needs strategic partnerships for the success of its political aims and who the best cohorts for that purpose might be given the threat environment detailed in various parts of the document. Instead, it chooses to begin with the contention that the critical challenge for India consists of how to leverage the interests of various rivals “because India will be sought after in great-power competition” (Para 123).
There is no doubt that the American, and in different ways the more modest Chinese, interest in India provides New Delhi with opportunities to play one against the other. That, however, is emphatically not the only game in town, something the report gives no sign of acknowledging. By presuming that the competition for partnership is primarily about a Sino-American rivalry for India’s favor, instead of being a more demanding challenge also revolving around India’s own need for strategic partners, the analysis ends up falsely exaggerating both India’s geopolitical relevance and its bargaining capacity relative to its stronger friends and adversaries.
This problem, which finds many echoes in popular Indian commentaries about security, reflects a solipsism that is both counterproductive and dangerous: counterproductive, because it embodies a smugness that prevents the consummation of genuine cooperation between New Delhi and Washington, and dangerous, because it presumes that the United States needs India more than India would need the United States if a genuinely aggressive China were to emerge in Asia. Nonalignment 2.0 raised many eyebrows among U.S. policymakers—although they have been discreet in expressing their reservations—because of the conceit reflected in its argumentation. For example, while the report plainly declares that “India holds a special attraction for the United States because it is the biggest of the new powers (apart from China itself)” (Para 130), it does not make any effort to affirm that the United States might hold a similar appeal for India, even though it goes to great lengths to describe a strategic environment that would easily justify such a claim. In contrast, several official U.S. national security documents in recent years have described India and its strategic importance in highly enthusiastic terms. Most damningly, however, even the Indian government in its official statements about U.S.-Indian relations has been far more enthusiastic about the United States as an anchor of Indian security than Nonalignment 2.0 is—despite it being a non-official report drafted by many individuals who are in fact champions of a stronger bilateral relationship with Washington.
At the end of the day, however, the dangerous belief about India’s disproportionate value to the United States may turn out to be far more consequential. Neither Indian nor American security will be advanced by a China that turns out to be assertive in Asia. However, if any acute forcefulness beyond what has already been witnessed were to materialize, India’s and China’s other neighbors could face the greatest brunt because of their proximity to China, although Beijing would undoubtedly attempt to defuse any unified balancing among these states by manipulating various threats and blandishments directed at each of them individually. The great margins of advantage in power that the United States still enjoys over China further immunize Washington in the event that the United States were to become an object of concerted Chinese aggression.
For India, therefore, the best way to avert the contingency of future Chinese belligerence is to build a sturdy ring of cooperative security partnerships with countries around China’s near and distant peripheries. This remedy is not directed toward containing Beijing—China cannot be constricted in the manner that the Soviet Union previously was, in part because it already enjoys strong economic links with all its neighbors, including New Delhi—but rather toward creating objective constraints on China’s misuse of power. Nonalignment 2.0 appreciates this strategic logic, which both the Bush and the Obama administrations have sought to institutionalize, as is evident by its remarks:
The retention of strong U.S. maritime deployments in the Asia-Pacific theatre, a more proactive and assertive Japanese naval force projection, and a build-up of the naval capabilities of such key littoral states as Indonesia, Australia and Vietnam: all may help delay, if not deter, the projection of Chinese naval power in the Indian Ocean. We need to use this window of opportunity to build up our own naval capabilities. Our regional diplomacy should support this approach by fostering closer relations with these ‘countervailing’ powers. This should include a network of security cooperation agreements with these states and regular naval exercises with them (Para 33).
Yet, in the same breath, it subverts the strength of this recommendation by suggesting that the optimal course for India politically is not to balance China in concert with the United States but rather to play those states against each other through nuanced policies centered on “careful management” of “the triangular relationship between India, China and America” (Para 134). This effort at “avoiding [some] relationships that go beyond conveying a certain threat threshold in Chinese perceptions” (Para 34) is justified in part by the uncertainties about Beijing’s future course. It also stems from other fears about the prospect of American decline and the threats posed by a possible U.S.-China condominium. The anxieties of being entrapped by American conflicts with other states in which India might have few equities also play a part, as do reservations about “how the United States might actually respond if China posed a threat to India’s interests” (Para 132). Finally, another important concern is that a strong U.S.-Indian affiliation “could prematurely antagonize China” (Para 132).
These issues are serious, but they can be addressed. The fears about American decline are a fashion of the times and are highly exaggerated, as is evident to anyone who chooses to compare the structural sources of Chinese and American power. The dangers of any meaningful Sino-American collusion are similarly overstated, given the transparent American history of “self-regarding” behavior that leads to brooking no international rivals. The risks of being ensnared in other American wars are also inflated because they underestimate India’s capacity to resist being drawn into conflicts that are irrelevant to its interests while simultaneously overplaying Washington’s supposed expectation of India’s involvement irrespective of its value or the larger context.
The uncertainties about whether the United States would support India in a Sino-Indian conflict and the unease about provoking Chinese belligerence by a precipitate compact with Washington are more significant problems that cannot be easily dismissed. Yet, they, too, ultimately do not undermine the case for a deep engagement between New Delhi and Washington. The idea that the United States might be ambivalent about constraining China if Beijing posed a serious threat to India arises only if New Delhi chooses a priori to eschew developing a meaningful strategic partnership with Washington. If that is the case, the United States has no incentive to take on any burdensome obligations to deter China. However, should a prior strategic affiliation exist between Washington and New Delhi, U.S. support for India would be all but guaranteed. The high costs of indifference in such a situation would fundamentally undermine American credibility, its deterrence effectiveness in other strategic locales, and the balance of power in Asia.
Much of the report’s ambivalence about a compact with Washington derives from the dangers of aggravating China’s security dilemmas and pushing Beijing into a more aggressive stance toward India. These fears cause its authors to not transparently endorse deterring China—even though that is exactly what the success of India’s transformation would end up doing—but rather to only advocate a middle course centered on striking “a careful balance between cooperation and competition,” which by extension requires “avoiding [those] relationships that go beyond conveying a certain threat threshold in Chinese perceptions” (Paras 34, 41). However understandable this calculation may be, the policy conclusion is not persuasive, not least because it runs counter to the challenges China already poses to India—and which are meticulously detailed in Nonalignment 2.0.
Most problematically, the document sets up a false strategic choice for India: an alliance with the United States, which presumably would be alarming to China, or mere friendship, which presumably would be more reassuring. This dichotomy is fundamentally misleading. Neither Washington nor New Delhi today seeks a mutual alliance against China because a deep partnership between the two centered on “strategic coordination” would provide all the benefits that a formal security treaty would bring to both without any of its liabilities.
In the economic realm, a consequential collaboration of this kind would require increased trade and investment between India and the United States, coupled with expanded exchanges of capital, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship, so as to produce heightened gains that compare favorably with the returns accruing to each country from its bilateral trade with China. In the strategic milieu, a deepened partnership would lead India to procure increased numbers of advanced American weapons systems as well as to engage in enhanced training and exercises that hone key functional skills and war-fighting competencies while increasing interoperability. It would foster the development of U.S.-Indian contingency plans for possible cooperative responses to certain eventualities. In addition, information and intelligence on a range of critical dangers confronting both countries would be shared, and regular high-level consultations by U.S. and Indian national security managers and military officers on all issues of mutual concern would be held. In the diplomatic arena, such a collaboration would necessitate frequent discussions by policymakers at all levels so that both sides appreciate the objectives and the constraints governing their respective national policies, avoid any surprises that may undercut the other’s core interests, and engage in policy synchronization—tacit or explicit—to the degree that such is judged to be appropriate and desirable.
A meaningful partnership along these lines does not require an official alliance of any kind and would not constrain either the United States or India in the conduct of its larger foreign policies. Both countries would be free to engage China and others—as they already do—on a wide range of issues, and to deepen their respective ties with Beijing and others as they saw fit. While the two countries will likely continue to differ on a host of issues, they will nonetheless be united by, in the reassuring words of India’s foreign secretary, Ranjan Mathai, “a fundamental stake in each other’s success, because in succeeding individually, [they] can advance [their] common interests and inspire a world mirrored in [their] ideals.” Such a preferential partnership would therefore preserve the “strategic autonomy” cherished by both capitals while simultaneously protecting each against the threats posed by a rising China.
It is indeed unfortunate that Nonalignment 2.0 fails to endorse this course of action as a grand strategic option for India. As Rajesh Rajagopalan aptly commented, “the report does a disservice by creating a straw man called ‘alliance’ to knock down without seriously considering India’s choices” when “India and the United States have common strategic interests regarding China that could lead to much closer U.S.-Indian strategic cooperation short of a formal alliance.” Many of the authors of Nonalignment 2.0 would admit to this proposition, but their analysis in the document does not reflect this insight. Instead, they compound the problem by engaging in an extended discussion of how India ought to play the United States and China off each other so as to secure the requisite “leverage,” even as they admit that in an emergency, India may be forced to cleave to one or the other of the two competitors.
The report’s fundamental flaw, therefore, consists of its underlying assumption that somehow the United States and China both pose different kinds of hazards to Indian security and, hence, a strategy of avoiding sharp alignment choices is justified until one or the other becomes the more salient, clear, and present danger. This unfortunate premise lies at the root of Nonalignment 2.0’s discussion about India’s strategic partnership with the United States, a position that is confirmed by the admonition that “India must be prepared for a contingency where, for instance, threatening behavior by one of the major powers could encourage or even force it to be closer to another” (Para 137). The premise is not only manifestly questionable—after all, China seeks to encircle India and limit its reach, while the United States supports India’s rise and champions its arrival as a global power—but, from an analytical point of view, it is refuted abundantly by the larger discussion about the Chinese threat in the report itself. In fact, quite apart from the China challenge, India should understand that the power it seeks to realize would be more easily achieved in an international system where the United States is preeminent than in almost any other.
The document’s own description of the dangers facing India naturally entails certain conclusions, but the report’s failure to recognize them has implications that obviously go beyond simple methodological shortcomings. If the government of India chooses to follow Nonalignment 2.0’s recommendations, it could end up undermining Indian security vis-à-vis China by creating exactly the space that Beijing could exploit to play India against United States. If China embodies the threat to India that the report contends, then the absence of a strong U.S.-Indian security partnership not only increases the opportunities for greater Chinese assertiveness but also weakens India’s capacity to respond because the failure to create institutional habits of cooperation in peacetime will undermine the effectiveness of any balancing that may arise in an emergency. Even more importantly, however, there is no assurance such balancing will occur when India may need it the most. The presumption that India will be able to readily find an ally in Washington during a bilateral crisis with China, irrespective of what its commitment to a strategic partnership with the United States has been in the interim, is therefore highly risky.
Consequently, the report’s claim that “the partnership game, if played delicately, can yield real benefits” (Para 135) is only half true, because it could also end up with India falling on its face, forlorn and scrambling for support in its moment of greatest danger—as happened once before in 1962. That “India as a potential partner can give it leverage, both with the country courting it and with potential rivals” (Para 135) is correct, but this leverage can be a decaying asset if the affiliation with the friendlier power remains forever prospective and is never actualized. It could also end up being a phony asset if, after all the attempts at straddling two stools, India ends up squarely between them. After all, delicately walking the tightrope only works well so long as the rope holds, as Machiavelli understood clearly when he warned, “to steer a middle course . . . is very harmful.”
As New Delhi navigates this predicament, it ought to remember that even the United States has a choice of strategic partners beyond India, some of which are better positioned geographically vis-à-vis China. It also already has a successful history of coping with far more formidable threats, such as the Soviet Union once was, without relying on Indian support. There is no reason, therefore, why it could not choose to pursue a similar approach to China again, if Indian hesitation about a preferential strategic partnership now compels it to look for other cohorts who might be more willing. That outcome would be regrettable from the viewpoint of consummating the U.S.-Indian relationship—given India’s own perceptions of the threat, not to mention America’s—because it could end up being more expensive for New Delhi and Washington alike.
The strategy of dangling between the United States and China, which Nonalignment 2.0 contends is the optimal course for India presently, makes sense only if it is believed that the perils posed by Beijing will attenuate over time, or that India will be able to muster the necessary resources to cope with the Chinese challenge, among others, independently. Clearly, the first possibility is nowhere on the horizon, as the report makes abundantly clear.
But what about the second opportunity? Obviously, the document has been authored in part to exhort the country to make the necessary decisions to increase its national power and, accordingly, underwrite the report’s preferred strategy of nonalignment. The preface transparently conveys this intention:
The necessity of such a document is driven by a sense of urgency among all its authors that we have a limited window of opportunity in which to seize our chances. Further, the decisions and choices we make in coming years will have long-term effects upon our future development and will set us down paths that will determine the range of subsequent future choices. It is therefore imperative that we have a clear map of the terrain which we shall have to navigate in coming years—and, equally, that we have a definite sense of the national goals, values and interests that we need to pursue with consistency and vigor.
Later in the text, the document amplifies this theme by declaring that “while the underlying trends [for India’s growth] are propitious, time is of the essence” as “the basic structures and dynamics necessary to achieve this prosperity will have to be put in place in the next 10 to 15 years” since “the underlying factors that are propitious for [India’s] growth may not last very long” (Para 6). Therefore, the report correctly concludes “that rather than imagining that growth can allow [India] to postpone hard decisions, [it] need[s] to take exactly the opposite tack. If [it] do[es] not take the opportunities provided by a relatively benign environment, [it] will not get a second chance to correct [its] mistakes” (Para 7).
The argument is impeccably logical and the urgency of action demanded in Nonalignment 2.0 is utterly commendable, but the third and final weakness discussed here consists of its failure to assess whether the transformative reforms necessary to build India’s comprehensive national power can in fact be undertaken in the current circumstances of India’s domestic politics. Any grand strategy of value must address this basic question because, no matter how sensible its recommendations may otherwise be, it is condemned to irrelevance if the courses of action suggested cannot be implemented.
There are many reasons today to be skeptical about India’s ability to pursue the ambitious reform agenda outlined in Nonalignment 2.0. First, there are only two national parties in India, the Congress Party and the BJP, which could execute a broad reform agenda with lesser difficulty in principle, because these parties possess greater capacities for public mobilization as well as ideologies reflecting the country’s ambitions as a whole. Yet both parties are in considerable disarray, and for the foreseeable future, they are likely to come to power only as part of complex and shifting coalitions.
While some coalition governments dominated by each party have proved to be exceptional in regard to advancing India’s national purposes, others have been less inspiring because the demands of satisfying the interests of their members often prevent them from directing their energies fully to making the “hard decisions” that are necessary for the successful generation of national power. The current ruling coalition, the UPA, is a good example of this problem.
A second phenomenon creates further uncertainties about whether the country as a whole can move in certain clear and demanding directions. India has recently seen the rise of regional parties as the new arbiters of the contest over national power. Generally speaking, these regional parties have relatively narrow interests revolving around the welfare of their particular states of origin. While they certainly appreciate the importance of those policies that affect India as a whole, they have a much weaker inclination to invest political capital in producing change on these issues in comparison to those that directly affect their own local base.
Moreover, the regional parties find themselves caught in the still-acute tensions between the challenges animating mass politics, such as the distribution of material benefits and the quality of governance, and elite politics, such as international partnerships and grand strategy. Their constituencies are likely to be less animated by debates about national security and economic reform—even though these concerns ultimately affect the lives of millions of Indians. Issues of elite politics will be engaged by the regional parties first and foremost in terms of how they affect their individual states. The changes in national policy that may be desirable, then, come about—when they do—much more slowly or, just as often, more haphazardly, as a result of India’s federal system.
Third, the intensity of political competition in India, which is in part a product of the success of Indian democracy, has resulted in leaders increasingly focusing on short-term gains intended to cement their lock on office. In recent years, and especially since 2009 when the present UPA government took power, this emphasis has resulted in a resurrection of policies that prioritize economic redistribution over economic growth. Such policies traditionally were manifested in vast state subsidies as well as pre-election giveaways such as free electricity, television sets, power generators, and cable television connections.
India’s national security managers ought to treat the report’s exhortation to eschew preferential strategic partnerships with friendly great powers like the United States with some caution—especially if, as the document suggests, the external threats facing India are unlikely to dissipate and China’s own power advantages over India, in particular, are “likely to widen” (Para 29). The United States, like India, also faces domestic political challenges in regard to mobilizing its national power, though the constraints in Washington are far fewer because it already has huge advantages relative to its peers where state penetration and extraction of societal resources are concerned. Still, the United States cheerfully concedes the need for strong and favored partners in its efforts to manage the rise of Chinese power. Given India’s extant and prospective weaknesses, there is no reason why New Delhi should not do the same.
Conventional realist theories of international politics suggest that if the success of internal balancing is uncertain, external balancing becomes a necessity. If there is a reasonable chance that India’s own resources may turn out to be inadequate to handling a growing Chinese threat—because, among other things, its domestic politics undermine its capacity for resource mobilization—then New Delhi ought to consider how best to secure the assistance of others in meeting its external challenge. Obtaining this support does not require entering into a formal alliance with the United States or with others, although that may be desirable in specific circumstances. In the past, India has not shied away from institutionalizing strong affiliations with both the United States and the Soviet Union that burst the bounds of nonalignment, even as it held fast to the rhetoric of neutralism. Nonalignment 2.0 concedes that a return to geopolitical intimacy of this sort may be necessary again, but if so, India ought to make a special effort to ensure that the building blocks necessary to consummate such a joint venture are put in place well before they become necessary.
While the United States would undoubtedly value such cooperation—and, in fact, craves it—India’s ideational affection for “nonalignment,” the political inability of its leaders and elites to forge a consensus in favor of a stronger association with the United States despite their intellectual acknowledgement of its necessity, and the failure of the current Indian government to pursue consistent and coherent policies vis-à-vis Washington all end up exposing India to greater strategic risk in the face of rising Chinese power. Nonalignment 2.0’s willingness to discount the benefits of tighter coordination with the United States could end up leaving New Delhi in a situation where it lacks the resources within and without to cope with the worst depredations of Chinese power.
The lead-up to the 1962 Sino-Indian War is a vivid demonstration of this danger. To be sure, India is much stronger today than it was in 1962, and it will only get stronger over time. But the essence of its predicament is still the same—and shows no signs of easing. Power in the international system is always relative and, for the moment at least, Chinese power appears to be outpacing India’s in almost every way—and in some cases, by orders of magnitude.
The Indian calculus elaborated in Nonalignment 2.0 may over time, however, prove correct. New Delhi’s quest to preserve its strategic autonomy and avoid unnecessary entanglements with the United States may be justified if, as many Indian analysts argue, Indian growth rates begin to approximate China’s current pace while China’s own future growth rates begin to flag, and the Indian economy begins to rival China’s in technological capacity, if not in size.
If such an outcome materializes, India’s desire to stay “nonaligned” in the interim will have paid off. But much can happen in that interim, and not all of it good for either India or the United States. And the interregnum itself could prove to be extended and drawn out. In such circumstances, not only would India find itself potentially adrift, but the United States would also be hard-pressed to justify its favored support for India at a time when U.S. relations with China—however problematic they might be on many counts—are deeper, more encompassing, and, at least where the production of wealth is concerned, more fruitful.
Nonalignment 2.0, too, is better than it appears at first sight. Better than any other recent effort in India, it represents a remarkable attempt at marrying the liberal-idealist strands of Indian strategic thought with the grim realities of India’s internal challenges and its dangerous external environment. There is perhaps no better national security document available that so masterfully surveys the key strategic tasks facing India: sustaining high levels of economic growth, strengthening democratic consolidation, and enhancing national security writ large.
In contrast to the failed past policies, the report boldly endorses deepened Indian integration with the global economy to raise national growth rates. It calls for the renewal of India’s institutional edifice and the strengthening of state capacity in order to reinvigorate Indian democracy. And it urges the Indian nation to modernize and reorient its military capabilities to better deal with external threats. All the while, the Indian state should work to increase its penetration into society and its effectiveness, to better promote social justice, and to improve national integration as a way to defuse internal dangers.
The great strengths of the report, then, consist of its resolute emphasis on building India’s national strength through setting its economic foundations right, its honest and penetrating analysis of current Indian weaknesses, and its accurate appreciation of the serious external threats posed by China and Pakistan in the context of a dramatically changing international system. For all these strengths however—and these are by no means inconsequential—Nonalignment 2.0 betrays weaknesses in its understanding of the emerging global environment and, most importantly, falls short in its prescriptions for how India should maximize its power under those circumstances.
The title of the document itself signals its most important limitation. Although most of its critics have excoriated the report for adopting an anachronistic label, its fundamental shortcomings are not simply semantic. Rather, they extend to the heart of the strategic solution that its authors believe is optimal for Indian interests in the emerging international order: a refusal to settle for any preferential partnerships in favor of a continued quest for nonalignment.
However attractive this answer may appear at first sight, it is deeply flawed not only on logical grounds but also, and more importantly, on substantive grounds. Nonalignment 2.0 fails to recognize that when economic interdependence coexists with interstate competition, the recipe for strategic success cannot consist of anything other than maximizing relative gains through tightened partnerships among a small number of friends and allies. Instead of internalizing this insight, it proffers a spurious and empty formalism called “strategic autonomy,” which far from serving as a viable alternative, is both misconceived and downright dangerous because it prevents India from accumulating exactly those resources it will most need to ensure its success and its security. One Indian diplomat, Ambassador T. P. Sreenivasan, succinctly summarized this point by declaring, “Strategic autonomy comes automatically to the powerful. In the pursuit of power, selective alignments are more crucial than nonalignment.”
To make matters worse, the report overlooks the sharp constraints imposed by India’s burdensome domestic politics on New Delhi’s ability to pursue the onerous transformation that would be necessary if the country were to truly attempt going it alone in the face of rising threats. However inspiring such a quest might be, the notion that Indian exceptionalism can survive by sheer force of example in a world of beasts could turn out to be excessively optimistic if not simply naive. After all, India’s capacity to lead by example will be, in the final analysis, largely a function of its material success, and this accomplishment will not come to pass without strong economic, political, and military ties with key friendly powers, especially the United States. Notably, Washington has also already committed itself to buttressing India’s rise in the face of the common challenge posed by growing Chinese strength. A sturdy U.S.-Indian strategic partnership thus remains the quintessential example of desirable joint gains for both countries.
The discussion in Nonalignment 2.0 itself shows that India’s strategic challenges are grave and increasing. Given this reality, and the fact that the success of its internal balancing is still uncertain, the strategic solution to India’s predicament cannot consist of resurrecting nonalignment in some new numerical iteration, but rather of India’s decision to solder a deeper and closer engagement with the world in general, and with its most capable friends and allies in particular. The alternative offered in the report fails to provide a rational solution to the problems of security competition amid economic interdependence, and it consequently turns out to be a perilous example of old wine in new skins.
I may add that the above extracts are no substitute for reading the full report which is both absorbing and worth close attention by India’s policymakers.
Cheers,
Ram Narayanan
US-India Friendship
http://www.usindiafriendship.net/
China will just shift focus on some other part of the border and continue to arm pakistan. F*ck them. We should start nibbling on their border and start turning up the heat on the Tibet front.
Now that the USSR has gone, we can still be friends with China," 
he said.