Grand Tamasha: Charting India-US ties’ future after Modi visit

The US should bolster India’s efforts to extend its military posture in the Indian Ocean region, Arzan Tarapore said

If there is one piece of commentary that dominated foreign policy discourse heading into the recently concluded summit between Narendra Modi and Joe Biden in Washington, DC, it was a Foreign Affairs essay titled, “America’s Bad Bet on India,” authored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace scholar Ashley J Tellis.

Tarapore, a research scholar at the Walter H Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, told Vaishnav that the expectation that India would or should join the United States in a future military response to a Chinese takeover of Taiwan is the wrong benchmark with which to assess US-India security cooperation (HT Photo)

Last week on the Grand Tamasha podcast—a co-production of Carnegie and HT—host Milan Vaishnav sat down with security expert Arzan Tarapore, who published a high-profile response to Tellis, titled “America’s Best Bet in the Indo-Pacific.”

Tarapore, a research scholar at the Walter H Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, told Vaishnav that the expectation that India would or should join the United States in a future military response to a Chinese takeover of Taiwan is the wrong benchmark with which to assess US-India security cooperation.

“How can we expect India, which is a relatively new partner of the United States with a very different history and a very different geography, to have the same degree of alignment with the United States that even treaty allies don’t have?” asked Tarapore. If even countries like France and Japan can’t have that degree of alignment, “we certainly can’t expect to India to have that degree of alignment that some people seem to expect.”

But Tarapore stressed that there’s a considerable amount the two countries can do together, short of coalition warfare. For instance, Tarapore argued that the United States should bolster India’s efforts to extend its military posture in the Indian Ocean region, support India’s development of high-value niche military capabilities and intensify its diplomatic coordination with India.

According to Tarapore, “India and the United States could develop a better combined posture in the Eastern Indian Ocean region” that includes another joint partner—Australia. “What this concretely means is having ships and aircrafts and munitions positioned…that can better safeguard Indian security interests there, as well as U.S. and Australian interests,” said Tarapore. “The three countries could share rotational deployments,” or “put their forces on the bases of the other countries.”

Tarapore also sees value in the United States and India coordinating more closely on diplomatic outreach, especially when it comes to countries in the Global South—with whom India enjoy a unique standing. “It is exactly this difference in political relationships and political interests that…could prove to be a huge asset to the partnership,” said Tarapore. “Where the United States and India agree on a common set of interests—especially revolving around Chinese coercion or aggression—India’s voice can actually help to take that common message to corners of the world where the United States does reach. In other words, the United States and India do not have to agree on everything because they agree on one big thing—China. “It is exactly that divergence between the United States and India that can prove to be an advantage it if it is mobilized…in advance of an act of aggression in the Indo-Pacific.”