Neoconservatives have urged Barack Obama to boost US defence ties with India to counter China. But the last thing the US needs is a polarized Asia, writes Robert Dreyfuss.
In advance of US President Barack Obama’s three-day visit to India this month, a panoply of Republican, conservative and neoconservative strategists in Washington urged him to use his trip to persuade New Delhi to join the United States in a political-military alliance. India, they argued, could serve as the lynchpin of efforts to cement the United States’ role as a superpower in Asia and the Indian Ocean—an anchor in an American scheme to surround and contain a China.
It’s a tempting proposition for a superpower. Over the decades, the United States has gotten used to viewing other nations as pawns and minor pieces on a sweeping chessboard, and for many conservative analysts India was seen not as a great nation in its own right, but as a bulwark against Beijing—just as in an earlier era, Beijing was viewed as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
For the most part, and to his credit, Obama declined to reduce India to the status of a chess piece. Though he called India ‘the defining partner of the 21st century,’ throughout his visit Obama kept the focus on trade, economics and jobs. ‘During my first visit to India, I’ll be joined by hundreds of American business leaders and their Indian counterparts to announce concrete progress toward our export goal—billions of dollars in contracts that will support tens of thousands of American jobs,’ Obama declared.
But back home, the president’s emphasis on economics disappointed the armchair strategists of the American right. Ever since the inauguration of the US-India strategic dialogue earlier this year, right-wing think tanks in Washington had salivated over the concept of an alliance between the two great nations against China. Ignoring India’s longstanding commitment to a nonaligned stance and neuralgic opposition to entangling alliances, and papering over the very real and significant differences between US and Indian interests, analysts at the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and the Heritage Foundation—the leading bastions of neoconservative thought in Washington—envisioned a kind of super-NATO linking the United States and India.
The neoconservatives, who have few channels into the Obama administration, must have been nostalgic for the days of the George W. Bush administration. Back in 2005, Tom Donnelly, a neoconservative military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote that ‘successfully wooing India is key to preserving the liberal, American-led international order.’
Photo Credit: Uniphoto Press
View as Single Page
Reddit
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Technorati
Yahoo
Google
Plurk
Percy
Mr. Dreyfuss makes a number of important points on a rather complex geo-political issue.
There is no doubt that China wants to project its military power. All you have to do is look at its strategy of circling India-the string of pearls-and its arming Pakistan as a further strategy to tie India down.
On a purely theoretical level it makes good sense to create a very tight economic and military relationship between the US and India. In a sense that is already taking place albeit not at the pace and degree of involvement subscribed to by the neo conservatives.
Although India has among the largest forces in the world, since independence its army has been used against Pakistan for self-defense. It is by and large a peace loving country and to be sure this characteristic has plagued its long history that permitted so many foreign powers to invade India from its earliest history.
I believe that peaceful coexistence between India and China is very unlikely. Whether India likes it or not, it is only a matter of time before it recognizes the China peril, and when it does, it will move closer to the US. But is shouldn’t wait too long.
The Europeans are a spent force and living of its past laurels. The US has over extended itself by a totally unnecessary war with Iraq, and the several thousands of troops stationed around the globe. It is in desperate need of a co-sheriff to counter thugs and terrorists around the globe, and the only country that can provide the muscle is India.
But first and foremost, the US has to get its foreign policy with Pakistan sorted out. It can no longer operate in denial and allow a deeply flawed relationship to hold at ransom the fuller blossoming of the US-India relationship.
Shiva
Sorry, but I am not a diplomat (nor diplomatic), but a just a simple thought crosses one’s mind:
i.e. But is not USA too a pawn to how India, Russia, China, Vietnam, Japan, Iran, Arab/Pakistan, etc, etc want to play this game? i.e. Is not USA too not accommodating these nation’s interests?
So before one starts on a tirade against “American hegemony”, please pause to also think how these other nations too manipulate America for their own ends – i.e. It was NEVER a one-way street as those Congress(I) and their Chinese-supporting Maoist (Gandhi?) supporters in India claimed it to be. So to those thinking otherwise, the suggestion is to please get your head from beneath your rear…
Martin
The mission of the modern United States is to ultimately install Cultural Marxism as the state political religion of every nation on earth, first by eradicating any cultural entity capable of resisting it.
Such a program need not be a structured “conspiracy,” in some sort of florid Dan Brown sense, for it to remain unified in its horrible purpose. Rather, the unity of purpose arises inevitably out of the malefic character of the people who hold the tiller of power in the West today. Their common values drive them towards the same goal as surely as if they were formally schooled in the agenda.
The international agenda of the United States is not an inevitable consequence of this time period in history, nor of material conditions, nor of anything more esoteric. Rather, it is the character of the people who have seized Western culture that drives the agenda, an agenda that will continue so long as they rule.