Why the United States Promotes India’s Great-Power Ambitions

by the Research Unit for Political Economy
This essay is adapted from Aspects of India’s Economy, no. 41 (December 2005).
In March 2005, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Washington’s decision to “make India a global power.” No doubt U.S. arms manufacturers can now look forward to large contracts from India; but this course is dictated by broader strategic considerations.
First, the United States is not worried by India’s ambitions: it knows that India is unable to project power across Asia independently. For example, India’s plans for a rapid-reaction force which could be deployed immediately in countries along the rim of the Indian Ocean cannot be pursued without fast long-range aircraft with aerial refueling capabilities, airborne early warning and command aircraft, attack helicopters, and a carrier in addition to the INS Virat. A significant share of this would have to be imported from the United States. Any drawn-out intervention abroad would require even greater infrastructure, which India lacks. (In fact, even the European Union countries are not equipped with the infrastructure for sustained projection of military force independent of the United States. This was demonstrated during the Balkans crisis, when they were forced at last to turn to the United States to intervene.)
Moreover, given the balance of military strength, India’s attempts to project power cannot be sustained in the face of U.S. opposition. Indeed, in 2003, then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee reportedly confessed that strategic partnership with the United States was essential to his twenty-year program to attain great-power status; “otherwise India’s ability to project power and influence abroad anywhere would be greatly compromised.”
The second reason for the United States to promote Indian ambitions is that it suits U.S. interests to do so. This is spelled out with brutal candor in at least three important U.S. sources.
The first is a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense in October 2002, titled The Indo-U.S. Military Relationship: Expectations and Perceptions. The report is based on interviews with forty-two key Americans, including twenty-three active military officers, fifteen government officials, and four others; as well as with ten active Indian military officers, five Indian government officials, several members of the National Security Council, and outside experts advising the Indian government. The second source is the writings of Ashley J. Tellis, a former aide to Robert Blackwill during 2001–03 when Blackwill was ambassador to India; he is considered at the moment a key U.S. policy analyst on India. The third source is the October 2005 study by Stephen Blank of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, Natural Allies?: Regional Security in Asia and Prospects for Indo-American Strategic Cooperation.
Context: U.S. Strategic Perspective Worldwide
The context for these studies is the situation of U.S. imperialism today and its current strategic perspective worldwide. We have written about this in Behind the Invasion of Iraq (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003) and hence will merely summarize that argument here.
On the face of it, it would appear that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States faces no serious challenge to its global hegemony. Its military expenditures are half of world military spending; around 3.5 times the total of the remaining members of the UN Security Council (China, Russia, Britain, and France); and double the total of the world’s next six largest spenders (Russia, France, Japan, Germany, Britain, and China—even taking China’s actual military expenditure to be double the official figure). The United States is the only country with the infrastructure and forces to project military force over long distances, and thus to fight sustained wars abroad, as it is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan at present. (Countries such as France and Britain are able to mount relatively small intervention forces to carry out operations against second-rate forces in, say, Africa.)
Yet it is economic power that ultimately sustains military power, and U.S. power is fragile at its economic base. The U.S. share of world income has fallen from half in 1950 to 21 percent today; its share of manufacturing from 60 percent in 1950 to 25 percent in 1999; its share of the world’s stock of foreign direct investment from 47 percent in 1960 to 21 percent in 2001.
No doubt the U.S. economy is said to be “doing well.” However, U.S. economic growth today is being maintained only by a systematic and massive expansion of consumer borrowing and government borrowing. An increasing share of goods and services are imported. Thus the U.S. current account—the balance of a country’s earnings and its expenditures from trade in goods and services, and investment income—has been in deficit for two decades, and it is now out of control, touching $668 billion in 2004. The figure for 2005 will be much higher. This gap has been covered by borrowing from abroad, making the United States by far the world’s largest debtor.
The giant U.S. current account deficit is funded by soaking up more than 70 percent of the world’s savings. Other countries place their savings in the United States for three reasons: the United States is the world’s dominant imperialist power; the U.S. dollar is still the leading currency for international payments; and many of these countries want to prevent the dollar from declining, since the United States is their main export market.
However, this game cannot continue endlessly, as the debt would have to be serviced by larger and larger shares of the U.S. national income in the future. International investors and central banks are aware of this, and they are contemplating shifting their investments elsewhere. If this were to happen, the U.S. dollar would fall, U.S. interest rates would rise, and the U.S. economy would be in danger of collapse.
The U.S. military plays a key role in staving off this eventuality. It protects the United States’ status as the dominant imperialist power worldwide and hence safe harbor for the world’s capital. It ensures (for example, by the invasion of Iraq and the threatened invasion of other countries) that the bulk of the world’s oil trade continues to be carried out in U.S. dollars. It maintains physical control of much of the world’s crucial resources (such as oil) as well as of trade routes—trump cards to be used against potential rivals for hegemony. It can also challenge potential rivals in an arms race such that it can undermine their economies.
However, U.S. military power too is increasingly vulnerable. First, it must cover the whole globe and check resistance anywhere, for its supremacy rests precisely on the inability of any power to defy it; it is in a state of permanent war. Indeed, precisely because it intervenes everywhere to protect its supremacy, it is the number one target of anti-imperialist forces around the world.
Second, while the U.S. military is well-equipped to knock down conventional standing armies, it has a poor record against guerrilla resistance and popular upsurges. The earlier liberation of Vietnam and the current Iraqi resistance have proved this amply. (In such cases its only hope lies in the manipulation of ethnic tensions.)
Third, one of the legacies of the great Vietnamese struggle is that the U.S. ruling classes now fear the domestic political consequences of large military casualties and of military conscription. Thus the U.S. armed forces are much smaller than would be required by its global hegemony. The United States may indeed finally institute conscription, but it would have to pay a heavy political price internally for doing so.
New U.S. ‘Global Defense Posture’
It is in order to maintain its hegemony over diverse and shifting potential adversaries that the United States has set up a vast network of military bases. The proliferation of new bases has spread U.S. forces even thinner. In 2003 the Pentagon announced a new basing policy, whereby it would close down 35 percent of the large Cold War–era bases (geared to war with the Soviet Union) and shift troops to a large number of small bases along what it calls the “arc of instability” in West Asia and Central Asia. These “lily-pad” bases (forward operating sites) would have minimal permanent facilities and limited permanent detachments, and they would serve mobile forces dispatched from the United States as required.
This new “global defense posture” is related to the new requirements of U.S. global hegemony:
“During the Cold War we had a strong sense that we knew where the major risks and fights were going to be, so we could deploy people right there,” Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said...“We’re operating now in a completely different concept....We need to be able to do that whole range of military operations (from combat to peacekeeping) anywhere in the world pretty quickly.” The Pentagon is seeking maximum flexibility in the decades ahead in responding to terrorism and other potential threats, including those to oil supplies. So the military wants a range of basing and access agreements with as many countries as possible and in as many regions as it can.
Apart from main operating bases and “lily pads,” there will be even more skeletal sites, called “cooperative security locations.” With little or no permanent U.S. presence, these may be maintained by “contractor or host nation personnel.” The United States wants a free hand to use these sites as it wishes:
Feith said the Pentagon wants to avoid the kind of environmental or political constraints that have limited U.S. military training and deployment options in Europe in recent years. “If countries are going to subject us to the kinds of restrictions that may mean we’re not going to be able to fulfill the purpose of having troops deployed there, then we’re going to have to think whether to have troops deployed there,” Feith said.
The Need for Indian Bases and Training Facilities
The U.S. War College study, which draws on discussions its author had with representatives of different military services at the U.S. Pacific Command, states bluntly:
We need tangible Indian support because our strategic interests and objectives are global, while the military and other means at our disposal to pursue them are not keeping pace....American force posture remains dangerously thin in the arc—many thousand miles long—between Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Okinawa and Guam in the Pacific....
The United States’ Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of 2001 openly asserted the need for more forces and bases in Asia “due to the expansion of threats there across the spectrum of conflict.” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Brookes told Congress in 2002 that
Distances in the Asian theater are vast, and the density of U.S. basing and en route infrastructure is lower than in other critical regions. Moreover, the U.S. has less assurance of access to facilities in the Asia-Pacific region than in other regions. The QDR, therefore, identifies the necessity of securing additional access and infrastructure agreements....
American officers, says MacDonald,
are candid in their plans to eventually seek access to Indian bases and military infrastructure. India’s strategic location in the centre of Asia, astride the frequently traveled Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC) linking the Middle East and East Asia, makes India particularly attractive to the US military.
U.S. lieutenant generals told MacDonald that access to bases in India would enable the U.S. military “to be able to touch the rest of the world” and to “respond rapidly to regional crises.” Moreover, in case U.S. relations with traditional allies (e.g., Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia) ever become more acrimonious, or collapse, or in case U.S. access rights to bases are restricted, “The US needs to develop alternatives in Asia. India is the optimal choice....”
An American colonel told MacDonald that
The US Navy wants a relatively neutral territory on the opposite side of the world that can provide ports and support for operations in the Middle East. India not only has a good infrastructure, the Indian Navy has proved that it can fix and fuel US ships. Over time, port visits must become a natural event. India is a viable player in supporting all naval missions, including escorting and responding to regional crises.
India has already provided port facilities for U.S. forces engaged in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, it has given the green signal for the United States to use Sri Lankan bases:
Despite years of trying to prevent any foreign state from getting near Diego Garcia and Eastern Sri Lanka’s base and port of Trincomalee, India has acted on behalf of the US Navy to secure its access to these ports and offered Washington access to its own ports for the GWOT (Global War on Terror). In return, Washington successfully pressured the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka to persevere in peace talks with the Sri Lankan government....[A]ccess to these bases in the Indian Ocean...is extremely valuable for operations and missions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia and could thus also serve as a check on Chinese naval ambitions in the Indian Ocean....Moreover, at the moment, US ships and planes now enjoy a case-by-case access to Indian bases.
The September 11 attacks in the United States, and India’s eager offer of its bases for the invasion of Afghanistan, marked a turning point. Before that point, a U.S. Navy ship visited India approximately every three years; now, according to U.S. Pacific Command officers, there are regular trips. Before September 11, the Indian government would not allow U.S. troops with weapons on the ground when responding to the Gujarat earthquake. “Today, after September 11, the US military has full access,” says MacDonald.
The United States also wants facilities for training in India; according to MacDonald, “India has a variety of landscapes, from ice-clad mountains to deserts, and it would help the Americans because military training ranges are shrinking and becoming increasingly controversial in the United States.” And for the U.S. Navy, training with the Indian Navy is the best way to become “proficient in the Indian Ocean region.”
Indian Armed Forces to Do the ‘Low-End’ Tasks
The United States needs not only Indian facilities, but the services of the Indian armed forces themselves. According to Ashley Tellis, their role would be lowly, but useful to the United States:
in those Asian areas of critical significance to vital US interests that would warrant the commitment of US resources, including force on a unilateral basis if necessary, India will remain a peripheral actor. But as its capabilities grow, so will its influence even if it is limited. And that influence can help advance shared bilateral interests if relations with New Delhi are adroitly managed.
In these critical areas, he writes, “the enormous disparity in power capabilities and resources between Washington and New Delhi will be so stark as to render Indian preferences entirely irrelevant.” Yet even in such matters, “Indian power could be dramatically magnified if it were to be applied in concert with that of the United States. In such circumstances, Indian resources could help to ease US operational burdens....”
Moreover, he emphasizes that Indian forces can be assigned tasks in areas/issues which the United States feels are not worth its direct intervention:
Indian power will be most relevant in those geographic and issue-areas lying in the ‘interstices’ of Asian geopolitics....In those areas, great power interests are neither obvious nor vital. Consequently, their incentives to enforce certain preferred outcomes unilaterally are poor. In such circumstances rising powers like India can make a difference because their substantial, though still not dominant, capabilities can swing the balance in favor of one coalition or another....
MacDonald suggests Indians could be assigned “low-end operations”:
[The] US military seeks a competent military partner that can take on more responsibility for low-end operations in Asia, such as peace-keeping operations, search and rescue, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and high-value cargo escort, which will allow the US military to concentrate its resource on high-end fighting missions.
The most immediate candidate for such “partnership” is the Indian Navy. Cooperation between the two navies took off after the September 11, 2001, incidents in the United States. For six months the Indian Navy undertook joint patrols with the U.S. Navy to escort commercial ships and patrol the busy sea lane running from the North Arabian Sea to the Malacca Straits.
That episode set a useful precedent. MacDonald says that “naval cooperation represents one of the most promising areas of service-to-service cooperation.” For one, “The Indian Navy is the only Indian service that is organised to operate outside of India’s borders.” It would invite less political opposition within India; in the words of an American admiral, “The Navy may be the easiest service to move forward with cooperation because the US Navy leaves no footprints in India. Exercises are conducted out of sight, with no US troops on the ground in India.”
The “New Framework for the U.S.-India Defense Relationship,” agreement of June 2005 specifically mentions, among other things, that Indian and U.S. militaries would conduct joint and combined exercises and exchanges; conduct joint responses to disaster situations; and collaborate in multinational operations and “peace-keeping” operations. Note that there is no mention of the United Nations; these operations will evidently not be carried out even nominally under its banner. This is part of the systematic U.S. effort to use disasters and regional conflicts as a means to introduce its troops and those of its allies in situations to which they earlier had no access. The July 18, 2005, joint statement between Manmohan Singh and George Bush speaks of a new “US-India Disaster Relief Initiative that builds on the experience of the Tsunami core group.” That group, which included India, was later dissolved and its efforts were placed under the UN, but the United States nevertheless managed to use the disaster to introduce its troops and equipment into Indonesia’s Aceh province and Sri Lanka (in the latter case it sent 1,500 Marines and an amphibious assault ship for “humanitarian purposes”).
Proliferation Security Initiative: Violation of International Law
The “New Framework” agreement of June 28, 2005, also mentions that the United States and India would collaborate “to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” In fact, India is set to become a part of the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a dangerous and illegal development. The PSI is not a treaty or an organization, but an informal coordination among a group of states, without binding terms or regulations, under the banner of preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Discarding the United Nations route, the PSI calls for the participating states to arrest (the term used is to “interdict”) the transport of WMDs, WMD delivery systems, and “related materials” to or from states or others who may be proliferating them.
“Delivery systems” presumably mean missiles and the like; the term “related materials,” however, is so vague that even materials for manufacture of fertilizer could be seized on the ground that they could be used for making WMDs. During the operation of the sanctions regime against Iraq (1991–2003), Iraq was prevented at one point from importing pencils on the grounds that they contained graphite, which could be used in weapons manufacture.
At their own initiative, and without the sanction of international law, the PSI participants may board and search any vessel in their waters or even on the high seas (i.e., beyond the territorial waters of any state) that is “reasonably suspected of transporting such cargoes,” and seize such cargoes. Even aircraft “reasonably suspected of carrying such cargoes” to or from proliferators of WMDs could be required to land and have their cargoes seized. (What would be the consequences if such aircraft refused to land? Presumably they could be shot down with their alleged cargoes of WMDs.)
As with the farcical U.S. claim of WMDs in Iraq, which formed the U.S. justification for invasion, the PSI’s claims would not be subject to the scrutiny of any international body, but could be based on U.S. “intelligence” (note the phrase “reasonably suspected”). Since in international law such actions as described above are understood as acts of war, India’s joining the PSI could have grave consequences.
A little over a year ago, when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was pressing India to join the PSI, senior Indian officials had expressed serious reservations regarding its legality. Now, however, India appears on course to become a participant in PSI. At the Seventh Asian Security Conference in January 2005, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee claimed that proliferation of WMDs through the sea lanes was “one of the biggest problems,” and he proposed that “initiatives such as the PSI” would “need to be examined in greater detail.” He said that the Indian Navy and Coast Guard could play a significant role in dealing with such threats. On May 21, 2005, the Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Arun Prakash said that if India were to join the PSI, “India’s status in world affairs warrants that we should be one of the core countries.”
In September 2005, the Indian Navy carried out its biggest-ever joint exercise with the U.S. Navy. Led by aircraft carriers and supplemented by guided missile destroyers, frigates, helicopters, spy planes, and fighter aircraft, the navies practiced interdiction on the high seas as well as visit, board, search, and seizure (VBSS) of vessels. Senior Indian officials denied that this was related to the PSI.