‘From complicated to dating’: US envoy to India on ties between two countries
Eric Garcetti was speaking at Carnegie’s Global Tech Summit 2023.
US ambassador to India Eric Garcetti on Wednesday said that the India-US relationship is a “force of good for the world,” and there was a “positive romantic ambiguity” for the future of the ties as a result of the deep desire on both sides to take it forward.
Speaking at Carnegie’s Global Tech Summit 2023, Garcetti said that ties between the two countries are growing increasingly broader and deeper, and the two sides are trying, not only to negotiate the differences, but also the next steps.
“It’s like our Facebook status for a long time, between US and India, was ‘It’s complicated’. Now, when you log on, it’s like, “They’re dating’,” he said. “And then we’re trying to figure out, maybe we’ve even moved in together and we’re like well your habits are a little different than mine... And we’re also trying to figure out, where does this go?”
“There’s a positive romantic ambiguity about where this will ultimately lead… But there’s a strong desire on both [sides to take the relationship forward],” he said.
He said the G20 was a strong example of the partnership, where it took India to negotiate with countries that it was close to and the US to negotiate with its closest allies to achieve a historic consensus. Russia and China’s joint opposition to the language around the war in Ukraine, its implications, and the need for its resolution were a huge obstacle to India’s quest to arrive at a joint communique during the G20 Summit, which culminated in Delhi in September.
“India-US relationship is not additive, its multiplicative. We demonstrated that at G20, where it was more than just 1+1 equals 2 countries, 1+1 actually produced 20 countries together with a historic and strongest, deepest statement ever put forward by a G20,” Garcetti said.
The US ambassador also talked about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to the United States earlier this year as an example of growing relationship. Normally, he said, “if you get three to five deliverables, that’s a strong state dinner. The week before [the state dinner], we were ploughing through 123 different deliverables.”
The back and forth, he added, didn’t end there and both sides have been in constant communication since, which is “unprecedented”, he said.
He said, he agreed with External Affairs Minister Jaishankar summation on the interactions: Think of that dinner as not as a high point of US India relations but a new base. He said this during a meeting on Monday during US deputy national security advisor Jonathan Finer’s visit to India. Finer was in New Delhi for a review of the India-US Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET).
“[President Joe Biden] is the very first president to say this is most consequential relationship in the world,” he added.
Garcetti agreed that China was an important aspect of India-US ties, but denied the assessment that the US-India relationship was based around China, saying that “our relationship is 95% fundamentally about other things. China is about deterrence.”
“Peace is critical, but deterring war, respecting borders and sovereignty, making sure that we don’t have people who steal intellectual property, that we are not overly dependent on any one place for a supply chain, is a deterrent peace,” he added.
When asked about a scenario where India is not able to absorb the impact of the US-China derisking, he said, “It would be a missed opportunity.”
Talking about how Foreign Direct Investment are not flowing at the levels that both sides are keen on, India, he said faces the challenges from being the “highest taxed input major economy in the world”.
“It’s not a criticism…but it’s harming your own internal capacity to be the manufacturing powerhouse that India should be. That we want it to be. That it is starting to accelerate to become but it will require some fundamentally deeper changes,” he said.
G20 Chief Coordinator Harsh Vardhan Shringla, who also participated in the discussions, said, “The relationship is amazingly multifaceted, but it’s also constantly evolving.”
“US and India are a force for good in the world together, not just for our countries,” he said.