Opinion Sleeping in New Delhi

On the face of it,the American conceptualisation of this strategic triangle is not new. In fact,many of President George W. Bush’s critics — in New Delhi and Washington — saw his historic civil nuclear initiative of 2005 as part of a strategic effort to boost India as a potential counterweight to China.

This presumption resulted in the Left parties pulling out of UPA 1 and made the ending of India’s prolonged nuclear isolation such a contested political terrain.

Beijing,which suspected that India is being drafted into a US-led containment right against China,attempted to block the approval of the civil nuclear initiative in the Nuclear Suppliers Group in the autumn of 2008. When it could not,Beijing announced a nuclear deal with Pakistan that was similar to the one between Delhi and Washington.

India’s nuclear debate during 2005-08 — probably the most vigorous foreign policy argument in Delhi since the China debacle of 1962 — revealed three important elements of India’s worldview.

One was the depth and breadth of the distrust of the United States across the Indian political spectrum. That the CPM on the left and the BJP on the right united to attack an agreement that was so clearly in India’s favour underlined the negative consensus against a strong and explicit partnership with the US.

The second was about the domestic political implications of drawing closer to Washington. The Congress party was ambiguous at best about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s nuclear initiative and was hesitant to overrule the CPM and alienate other political constituencies.

The third was the entrenched fears about American power. Recall the nightmare scenarios in the Indian nuclear debate about our strategic weapons programme being neutered and Delhi becoming a subaltern to Washington.

Despite the eventual conclusion of the nuclear initiative,Indian apprehensions about American power have not disappeared. They are reflected in the continuing ambivalence in Delhi,especially in the defence ministry,about deepening defence and security cooperation with Washington.

While the Indian discourse remains at the same place,the world has become a different one in the last few years. When Dr Singh and Bush announced the nuclear deal in 2005,the US was at the peak of the so-called “unipolar moment”.

The financial crisis that enveloped the US since 2007 has dramatically altered American fortunes. Obama’s decision to cut nearly $500 billion from the planned US defence spending in the next decade is a bow to a new economic reality at home.

If the US Congress does not reverse its recent cap on deficit spending,defence cuts of another $500 billion will be automatically triggered next year.

As the president told the American people in his introduction to the new defence guidance,“we must put our fiscal house in order here at home and renew our long-term economic strength”.

Ever since he took charge in 2009,Obama had argued that nation-building at home must take priority over fanciful ideas on reconstructing failed states around the world.

Obama has ended the US occupation of Iraq and insisted that his early military surge in Afghanistan will be terminated in 2012 and that the US forces will end their combat role by 2014.

Put simply,the era of American military adventurism is over. While Washington will remain the world’s foremost military power,Obama has now ordered a historic downsizing of US military forces,scaled back its geopolitical ambitions,and reduced the military missions it can undertake at any one time.

As the Pentagon prepares for an age of austerity,Obama’s new priorities have called for reducing military presence in Western Europe,avoiding costly wars of occupation of the kind it had embraced in Iraq and Afghanistan,and redirecting its shrinking forces to Asia to cope with the rise of China.

If the US had ignored the challenge from China at the zenith of its power in the last decade,Washington is now scrambling to deal with Beijing’s expanding military prowess in Asia at a time of its greatest weakness since World War II.

The internal arguments in Washington and Beijing are about the same theme — the rapidly changing balance of power in Asia between the US and China. While Washington and Beijing are debating with great intensity and some sophistication the meaning of this power shift for their national strategies,much of Delhi’s policy establishment is either blissfully unaware or utterly reluctant to confront the implications of American decline and Chinese rise.

The Indian elite that has got so comfortable posturing about US hegemony will soon find American weakness might have bigger consequences for its security. Delhi has also long laboured under the illusion of some kind of parity with China.

There was indeed a measure of equivalence with China until the turn of the 1990s. Since then,China has rapidly pulled away from India on every indicator of national power over the last two decades.

America’s decline,China’s rise,and the changing balance between them will affect every aspect of our national security in the coming years. Whether an aggressive Washington drifts into a new Cold War with Beijing or a diminishing US appeases China,India will find itself in deep strategic discomfort.

But who or what might wake up the Kumbhakarna from his slumber in Delhi?

The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research,Delhi
express@expressindia.com