The Uncertain Future of U.S. Relations With India

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Ashley, Nirupama, Dhruva, thank you so much for joining me. Ashley, thank you for the forceful essay that was in our most recent issue; it’s called “India’s Great Power Delusions.” And thanks to all three of you for the fascinating debate about Ashley’s argument that appears in our forthcoming issue.

Ashley, I’ll go to you first since you set this whole exchange off. One striking thing about the critique of Indian strategy and the skepticism about Indian ambitions in this new piece is that it comes from you, of all people. You are someone who has played a really key role in making the U.S.-Indian relationship what it is today, as both a scholar and as an American official in the U.S. embassy in New Delhi during the George W. Bush administration, when the U.S.-Indian Civil Nuclear Agreement became the foundation of a new, deeper U.S.-Indian partnership after some decades of real wariness.

Before getting into the argument of your original essay, I think it’s worth going back to that moment. What was the case for the geopolitical opportunity that you saw between the United States and India, and how do you understand the arc of Indian foreign policy, especially as it concerns the United States, in the two decades since?

ASHLEY TELLIS

So, first, let me thank you, Dan, for bringing us together to have this conversation. And let me go to what is still the central motivating driver for me in writing this piece. I’ve always had the view that India’s rise is in U.S. interests. And what we’ve done over the last quarter-century or so has been an investment, first and foremost, in our own interests. And secondarily, I think it, of course, helps India—but that has been a consequence of a policy that was driven primarily in order to protect American interests. I don’t think that ambition has changed, nor should it. But I am concerned by the fact that the two objectives that we set out to protect—first to create a stable balance of power in Asia, and second to build a partnership that would protect the liberal international order globally—are both objectives that are increasingly embedded today. And they’re embedded because of developments both at the Indian end and at the U.S. end. And so this article that you carried in Foreign Affairs was not intended to be just a narrow discussion about alignment with the United States—although that obviously is a central part of the argument—but rather to think about what this partnership means for these two big objectives. And in time, I’m happy to describe what I see are the challenges, but I think those are the motivating factors that led me to offer this reflection, as it turns out, 25 years after we began this effort.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s go to the piece in a bit more detail. It makes a forceful case that India is missing the opportunity you highlighted because of some central features of both its foreign policy and its domestic policy. What are those features, and how are they, in your view, inhibiting both India’s rise and the potential for that partnership?

ASHLEY TELLIS

So, let’s start with what I think is the most salient development of the last 25 years, right? It is the confirmation that China’s rise is not an accident; that it is a reality that is here to stay. And that rise is going to impose real security challenges to India. As we saw most recently, actually, in the recent India-Pakistan crisis, where the extent of Chinese-Pakistani cooperation, both at the strategic and at the operational level, was truly astounding. So, the fact that China’s rise is going to pose real challenges to India and, of course, pose long-term challenges to the United States is the reality that we simply have to grapple with.

Now, in the face of this reality, the fact is that India’s economic performance, while being very impressive over the last two decades, in my judgment, will still not get it to the point where it can balance China independently and thereby protect that Asian balance of power that we had envisaged as being very important for our interests going back 25 years ago. And the rising illiberalism in India, of course, I think, is unfortunate for many reasons, but one of the things that I emphasize in the article is that it has an impact on India’s ability to mobilize power, potentially. And to that extent, it actually has material effects. Now, it also contributes to the subversion of that second objective that I identified, which is upholding the liberal international order. But here, India is not unique. The United States is as much an exemplar—particularly in the current political incarnation—of a failure to uphold an order that it itself built, and which is in long-term American interest.

So, the point that I was making in this piece was that we are now confronted with a reality where India will not be able to match China independently, or where it is going to need partners. And I think the critical and most valuable partner is going to be the United States. And I am troubled by the possibility that India’s belief that a diversity of partners will be a good enough substitute for the United States, and that’s really the angst that underlies the piece, right? So, I’m not opposed to the diversity of partnerships, per se, because India’s always had a diversity of partners, but I worry that the single-minded pursuit of this diversity would actually weaken the case for the U.S.-Indian partnership.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We will get into lots of those elements in further conversation. But Nirupama, let me first go to you. I want to get a distillation of your critique of Ashley’s piece, but before we do that, I wanted to ask you about your own personal role in this relationship, as well, because you were in a series of increasingly important positions in Indian foreign policy—Ambassador to China, Ambassador to the United States, and Foreign Secretary—and therefore a central player in shaping both the contemporary U.S.-Indian relationship, but also Indian strategy over this period. So, to set the terms, how do you see the arc of both the U.S.-Indian relationship and Indian strategy over the last couple of decades, and where does it differ from Ashley’s characterization of it?

NIRUPAMA RAO

Thank you, Dan, for inviting me to be a part of this debate and to be here with Ashley and Dhruva. The arguments that Ashley makes in his essay are quite compelling, and it’s not that I have sought to throw them out, as far as my response to his very well-thought-out comments are concerned, because I know that his thesis is quite well-supported by observable gaps in India’s capabilities. But before I go into the details of what I have to say, you asked me about my experience with these key relationships that India has, whether with the United States or with our neighbor to the north, China. And through the years, as you may well know, I’ve been a very strong votary of better and better relations between India and the United States, and I’ve been witness to much of the growth of this relationship and to the fact that it has enormous substance to it and is truly a natural partnership between two large democracies who are pursuing—yes, through history, have pursued, perhaps—a different trajectory of experience and the environment in which they live. I believe India’s environment—geopolitical environment—is complex and not easily understood by our friends in the West.

When it comes to China, of course, it is a fraught relationship, replete with its own complications and complexities, and we have to practice not only deterrence but also understand that we cannot completely disengage from China. And that has been the experience of many decades, especially since the late 1980s, when our then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi began the opening to China, which was followed by almost four decades of peace and tranquility on the Line of Actual Control, or, to put it loosely, the border between the two countries. Today, five years after the clash on the Line of Actual Control in Eastern Ladakh, in the Galwan Valley, the relationship has been through many downs, really, and it’s slowly picking up the threads again. The complexities remain and the estrangements persist about both countries beginning to engage with each other once again.

Coming back to what Ashley has to say—yes, his thesis is well-supported by observable gaps in India’s capabilities. But I think we should avoid flattening the rationale behind New Delhi’s foreign policy orientation. I think we need a more nuanced critique in order to understand India, not as delusional, but in my words, I think India is a liminal one, to use an anthropological term. It’s a state standing on a geopolitical threshold, deliberately dealing with ambiguity to preserve flexibility and autonomy when it comes to promoting its national interests.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Dhruva, we got that distillation of where Nirupama differs from Ashley’s analysis. What is your critique, or where do you differ from his?

DHRUVA JAISHANKAR

Thank you for having me. It’s a great pleasure to be joined by two people—and I’m not sure how much some of your listeners would appreciate that these are really two people who’ve done a lot for the U.S.-Indian bilateral relationship over the past few decades, both as policymakers, but also by just explaining the United States and India to audiences in each other’s countries. And for a relationship that is sometimes characterized as one of the most important bilateral relationships in the twenty-first century, it’s surprising how few people there are who are able to do that, and it’s a pleasure to be here with two such individuals.

I think there are a few points where I would agree quite strongly with what Ashley said on the podcast, although I feel it’s not necessarily reflected—at least not stressed to the same degree—in his essay. One is that India’s rise is in U.S. interests, and remains so for the reasons he very nicely articulated. And so it’s not been completely altruistic on the part of the United States to engage with India and to partner with India, but it has also been done to advance U.S. interests. Second, that at least one objective is to retain a stable balance of power in Asia—in the Indo-Pacific—and by extension, globally as well. And that balance of power is now under threat by China’s rise, and both the nature and the rapidity and scale of China’s rise. So, I think, again, no real objection there. And the third is that India cannot balance China entirely on its own; that while, again, India has risen quite considerably, its share of global GDP has almost tripled since 1991, but the gap with China remains considerable.

I think my differences, though, would be threefold. This really gets into, “what does one do about this?” once you’re done analyzing this situation. And I think the biggest challenge is that the United States is not offering India an alliance. And certainly, that’s not true under Donald Trump’s presidency, where the United States is actually watering down some of its alliance commitments, both in Europe and in Asia. But even under a Democratic presidency, say the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, even if he had a strong mandate in Congress, it’s difficult to imagine any formal alliance being ratified by the U.S. Congress with India, or with many other partners for that matter. And in fact, the last—I looked this up—bilateral collective defense agreement that the United States signed and ratified was in 1960 and was with Japan; NATO expansion has been a bit of an aberration and exception to the rule.

Furthermore, it’s not as if India needs an alliance with the United States, not, at least, one that is formally defined in the way a lot of traditional U.S. alliances—Cold War alliances—were constructed. So, unlike a lot of others, India does not need U.S. troops or bases or military aid or a mutual defense treaty or joint commands or a nuclear umbrella, and that’s what a lot of allies expect of the United States. But short of that, I would argue, it can, and is, in fact, doing a lot with the United States, including activities that some might describe as of a quasi-alliance type behavior, or more formally, a partnership. And this extends to unprecedented intelligence sharing—and we saw this after the Galwan clashes five years ago, combined maritime operations, ship repair agreements, mutual logistics assistance, and another recent example, signed a couple of years ago, is the Security of Supply Arrangement, or SOSA, in 2023. That, I think, is the main area of departure, which is that it suggests India is turning down something which is really not on offer.

Now, two things follow from that, given these realities. India has little choice but to strive for a multipolar order because: one, the world is not reverting to unipolarity, barring a sudden collapse of China, as of U.S.-led unipolarity; second, an alliance, as I said, is not on offer from the United States in a world of increased bipolar competition; and third, another possibility, which is a U.S.-Chinese condominium of G2—what some have described as a G2—would actually marginalize Indian interests and would cut India out, and thus striving for a multipolar order in which Indian interests are to be defended and secured is a natural aspiration for a rising India.

One final point on this. I think Ashley stressed—one thing he said, which I think I would disagree with—his concern is that the United States has offered India various benefits to a partnership that India has repeatedly demurred. And I’m not sure, I think, if you look back on the last 25 years, under the last three prime ministers of India, going back to 1998, that has necessarily been the case. In fact, one could argue that all three prime ministers, in their own ways, actually stuck their necks out to improve relations with the United States. And so what follows, that the United States is one of many partners, and that those partnerships are somehow equal, I’m not sure, again, holds up; that today the United States is, in fact, the most important partner for India, if you take the entire breadth of the relationship from trade to defense to energy to people-to-people contacts. Today, the United States remains India’s most important partner.

And so, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee––who called the United States and India natural allies––after India’s nuclear test, he actually made an assiduous effort at normalizing relations with Washington. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh actually put his government on the line over the question of the relationship with the United States. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has probably done more to advance that relationship, including visiting the United States more than he has any other country. So, I do think that there has been a fair amount of effort made on the Indian side at building up this relationship, and that continues. I mean, today, the fact is India has been working quite assiduously to finalize some kind of trade agreement with the Trump administration.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Ashley, I want to give you a chance to respond to what both Dhruva and Nirupama have said, but let me stress one particular point, and that’s this argument about multipolarity. You criticize Indian strategists and policymakers for being committed to the pursuit of a multipolar world, and also the diagnosis—that prediction—that the world will become multipolar. Why do you think that’s a mistake?

ASHLEY TELLIS

Well, I think it’s a mistake simply because of arithmetic. If you look at the growth trajectories of the four major entities in the global system and project that out to 2050, you’re looking at the United States, you’re looking at China, you’re looking at the European Union, and you’re looking at India. Every other country falls below this big four in terms of raw economic size in 2050. Now, if you look closely within these big four, the United States and China really towered above the EU and India. Now, this is a judgment that is dependent on many assumptions about growth rates and so on and so forth. But if you make reasonable assumptions about the growth rates of each of these entities, you end up with a world that is either unipolar—that is the United States really stands above the other three—or you end up with a world that is asymmetrically bipolar, that is the United States and China tower above the other two, even though China doesn’t quite match up to the United States.

Now, that has an implication for me; it has actually two implications. One is that, even though China is not going to be a comprehensive pair of the United States, in the sense that it’s not going to match the United States across all dimensions of national power; it will still be capable enough to, shall we say, give us a few sleepless nights. But because the delta between Chinese capabilities and Indian capabilities will be so significant, it’s going to give India even more sleepless nights, which to my mind makes the logic for a special relationship, if I may put it that way, between the United States and India, very, very compelling. Now, of course, we’d like to have the EU in this coalition as well, but for reasons of geography, the EU may not see China in the same way as India and the United States do. And it’s not clear that the EU will remain a unified political entity even by 2050, right? So, I want to keep them in the equation, but I don’t want to put my money on them.

So, by the simple arithmetic of growth rates, there is no way in which you get a world that is multipolar. Now, the people who argue for multipolarity are really describing greater systemic complexity. There are layers and layers in the superstructure of the system that have gotten complicated; you have multinational organizations, you have NGOs, you have all kinds of complexities that are layered over the broad distribution of power. This goes to a big methodological question that underlies my difference with both Nirupama and Dhruva on this. To use the old Marxian language, there is a base, and there’s a superstructure. The base is the distribution of power among states, and it’s a material distribution of power. And then there’s a superstructure, which consists of everything that is layered over that distribution. Now, the real question is: which of these layers have causal capabilities to determine outcomes?

And my argument is, and I really believe this, so I’m not just making this up for the sake of the article. I really believe that the causal outcomes are determined by the material distribution of power. And the elements of superstructure qualify those outcomes in some ways, but they don’t fundamentally transform. In other words, the most important outcomes in global politics will be determined by the material relative differences in capability. So, I’m skeptical about the multipolarity argument, but let’s get to the policy implications. This is sort of an international relations theory excursus, right? The policy implications are this: if, at the end of the day, India is going to need the United States, and the United States is going to need India to deal with the China challenge, then I simply think it is unproductive as a policy measure for India to be pursuing multipolarity, which, by definition, implies a diminishing of U.S. power, at exactly the time when it needs the United States in order to cope with China. I mean, that’s the nub of my argument.

And when I say this, I want to clarify something because of the poverty of our language. We can very easily describe the relationship between the United States and NATO. We can describe the relationship between the United States and Japan. It’s harder to encapsulate what exactly is the relationship between the United States and India. And so, I never talk about an alliance. I talk about an alliance-like, or something that resembles an alliance, because I’m trying to capture what is an intractable sort of reality. So, I’m not arguing for an alliance relationship of the kind that we have with NATO. And to me, the essence of the alliance relationship is collective defense. So, I’m not arguing that we should have a collective defense agreement with India, which I think Dhruva is absolutely right—that is not an offer, and possibly will never be an offer. But to my mind, there is a lot that we can do short of that collective defense arrangement.

Now, this is where I think Dhruva and I also disagree. Dhruva makes the argument that everything that India and the United States have been doing, so far, is moving in that direction of alliance-like, even if it’s not collective defense, and that’s adequate. My view is that we are moving in that direction, but it’s not adequate, and we have to do a lot more.

And what is it that I’m arguing for? I think I’m arguing for three things. One is that I’m arguing for much greater Indian sensitivity to U.S. interests at the level of broad international interactions, because I have seen in practical circumstances of policymaking where India’s relations with other states have now become impediments to the kinds of things we want to do with India. I saw this very, very close up during the Biden years when we were discussing the U.S.–Indian Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (ICET). ICET was the initiative on emerging and critical technologies that the Biden administration and the Modi government reached, and there were many pillars of ICET; these were all high technology pillars, like artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and so on and so forth. And I saw up close how the United States was inhibited from moving as much as we would’ve liked, if it were not for India’s relations with some of our competitors, Russia in particular, on some specific issues. But there is also a general discomfort with India playing in groupings that don’t always wish us well, right? So there’s a practical effect of India’s multi-alignment on the trajectory of U.S.-Indian relations. So one, I think India needs to be a little more conscious of the impact those engagements are having on the bilateral relationship.

Two, I’m actually arguing for much more robust cooperative defense. And by cooperative defense, I mean we need to think about how we can coordinate in an emergency. Now, the fact of the matter is simply this: when India faces hard times and is with its back to the wall, it picks up the phone, dials 911, and the 911 is somewhere in Washington. That happened during the Galvan crisis; it happened in crises that went before. And the United States has provided emergency assistance. So we’ve provided either equipment or we’ve provided intelligence, or whatever you have it. What I want is to be able to institutionalize these patterns of activity so that they don’t turn out to be accidental, they don’t turn out to be one-off, and most important of all, they end up building Indian capabilities for deterrence. Now, I take Nirupama’s point completely, that India cannot live on deterrence alone, it needs reassurance strategies, and so on and so forth. I don’t deny that. But to my mind, the deficits in India’s strategy are not at the reassurance end. India does very well with respect to reassuring its adversaries. India does less well with respect to deterring them. And it’s that deficit that India needs to make good on, and it’s also the same deficit that we have vis-à-vis China, which we need to make good on.

And so, my argument is you need to start thinking about cooperative defense where there is no automaticity of assistance that is presumed by either side, but there are real serious institutional forms of cooperation that precede conflict and that allow us to do many more things than we are doing today. And of course, I have not had the opportunity to describe what cooperative defense would mean extensively, but one can think about coordinated defense planning; one could think about developing shared threat assessments; one could think about exchanging information about what one needs to maintain certain deterrence capabilities, and which could be provided by the United States to India, and so on and so forth. I promise you that we’ve not got into this level of conversation except in possibly one area, which is undersea warfare. But other than that, we really have not touched this seriously.

And then the last area, of course, to my mind, is a much deeper economic relationship between the two countries. And I’m not thinking of a trade agreement of the kind that is being negotiated right now because that is being done with a gun to New Delhi’s head, and it’s done primarily with the intention of getting the United States off India’s back. And I can understand India’s response. But I’m talking about a genuine symbiosis between the two economies, and that would require, I think, India to rethink not just its trade policy, but its economic strategy more generally. So, there are different components that I think we need to be investing in, and none of those require a formal alliance, which is centered on collective defense.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Nirupama, let me go to you on this question of multi-alignment. My sense is that’s quite central to India’s sense of its own strategy. This has gone under different names and different eras. Strategic autonomy is related to this; it was non-alignment during the Cold War. What is the case for multi-alignment, or strategic autonomy, as a necessary feature of Indian foreign policy? What do you think Ashley’s critique there gets wrong?

NIRUPAMA RAO

First of all, I don’t think we should refute the fact that strategic autonomy is not central to the Indian interest. Our geostrategic context, first of all, is very unique. I know that Ashley’s not arguing that we should become alliance partners of the United States, and we are not treaty allies, obviously, and nor do we share a historical or ideological military alliance tradition like NATO members do with the United States. I think the United States needs to appreciate—and many do, but still, I think there are people who have dissenting opinions on that—we should understand that India sits at the crossroads of the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia, and it’s bordered by unstable regions, we all know, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, and very complex powers like China and Russia. The idea of cooperative defense, as Ashley said, we need to develop the concept further.

But as I see it, if we are thinking of a relationship whose parameters involve a more tight defense relationship with the United States, what is at the back of India’s mind? I mean, I’m not part of the policymaking circles in New Delhi, but I can sense it. I mean, it’s part of muscle memory. We are concerned about provoking China into greater aggression across the Line of Actual Control. We all know that the Chinese are paranoid. They’re horribly insecure of any moves that we make which bring us closer to the United States. There is, of course, increasing Pakistani military dependence on China, which further destabilizes the subcontinent, and we saw that, of course, in full play during Operation Sindoor. And then, there is certainly the shadowy specter of whether we are going to alienate Russia. Russia has been a historic defense partner, major arms supplier, and we would like to maintain strategic diversification. That’s number one.

The second thing is about India’s military posture. Now, while China enjoys conventional military superiority—it’s true—India is no pushover. And our recent responses, whether it was Galwan or Operation Sindoor, they’ve demonstrated India’s willingness and capability to assert our sovereign interests, and without leaning excessively on external powers. I’m not in any way discounting whatever assistance we receive from the United States, but I think we have also acted independently and as a sovereign power when it comes to dealing with these threats to our national security. And we are ramping up indigenous defense production, may I add, although we’re still far away from the targets that we’ve set for ourselves. So, I would say we are not in the business of practicing alignment mechanisms, perhaps. It’s more hedging strategies, even if that sounds quite clichéd. And I think that when you say that the China-Pakistan nexus may necessitate a much closer relationship between India and the United States, I don’t think we are throwing that argument out the door. But it’s just that we feel that over-alignment may entrench the Sino-Pakistan axis further, given the two-front threat scenario that we face.

Now, Ashley also mentioned that India tends to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, but I want to say that strategic ambiguity or strategic autonomy is not hypocrisy. It’s really, from the Indian point of view, the practice of quite sophisticated statecraft, because we are not being opportunistic; we’re not being duplicitous. It is more strategic hedging. And mind you, this is not a technique for which India holds the patent alone. It’s a technique practiced by [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] nations, and even major powers like France. So, therefore, we buy arms from Russia, we cooperate with the United States on defense technology, and we balance both in multilateral diplomacy. Now, what would we do during crises—whether it’s Ukraine, whether it’s Taiwan? Well, we’ve chosen interest-based neutrality. We ensure our energy security by importing energy from Russia, and we’ve been very open and very emphatic about keeping open the lines of economic engagement with the West. So, in my view, this is being pragmatic, and we’ve rejected any binaries which slot the world into oppositional fields, China versus the United States or vice versa.

So, don’t force us into any situation of binary alignment. We’d like to continue to straddle worlds, the global South and the “great power club.” There’s a very strong post-colonial identity in India, and it has historical solidarity with the global South. And at the same time, we want to engage with great power platforms: with the Quad, the [Group of Seven]-plus outreach, high-tech defense cooperation, and we don’t reject or fully embrace any ideological camp. We prefer issue-based coalitions, and we really balance continental and maritime priorities. As a Eurasian land power, we share very complex relations with China, Pakistan, Russia, Central Asia. As an Indian Ocean power, we have growing stakes in Indo-Pacific maritime security, where we partner with the United States, Japan, and Australia. So this is a kind of dual identity. You might call it Janus-faced, but this really is the best for India. We have to be nimble at practicing nuanced navigation, not rigid alignments.

So, in many ways, this is [the reality] until we really arrive at great power status while we are ascending the ladder. I know we are rising. We lag behind very much, of course, the United States and also, to a large extent, behind China, and we are battling infrastructure gaps. We battle poverty. We battle governance challenges. But our foreign policy is really shaped by our aspiration, in terms of how we define where we are going, and we operate within certain constraints. We would like to lead, but we first have to seek to stabilize ourselves. So, it’s not indecision, but it’s a position that we’ve chosen with care and deliberation, and strategic maturity really requires such restraint and such pursuit of situations that provide for balancing mechanisms. In fact, I always liken India very much to the early United States—a new republic navigating hostile great powers, uncertain about where to commit itself. And like early American foreign policy, we have avoided entangling alliances until we are fully capable of shaping outcomes according to our own terms.

Now, I’d like to just take the point that Ashley mentioned about, how do you encapsulate the relationship between India and the United States today? And I would define it as strategic convergence without a formal alliance—a partnership of shared interests, but not shared obligations. And that, I think, is where the dissonance comes in. And I think the United States has come, by and large, to accept India’s unique part, recognizing our role as strategically autonomous, but a like-minded power. We are friends with overlapping interests, but not identical agendas.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Dhruva, I want to go to you on this question of strategic autonomy and why you believe that it, or multi-alignment—which I don’t believe is the term you use, but is often related—is in fact a necessity for India. But let me press you on the Russia-Ukraine piece of this. I think there’s more sympathy in Washington for the balancing act that India needs to play with China, just given the history and the geography. Russia, there’s some sympathy for the history, but I think a little bit more frustration. How do you see that particular piece of it in the strategic autonomy context?

DHRUVA JAISHANKAR

I think a distinction needs to be made. Something you said, Dan, in the past, it’s non-alignment, strategic autonomy, and multi-alignment—I don’t personally like to use the term multi-alignment because I think, to get to Ashley’s point, it gives the misleading impression that all of India’s relationships are equal when they are practically not so. But I think each had a particular history. The context is sometimes muddied. So, non-alignment had a very specific purpose in the early years—and I stress the early years—of the Cold War, and it changed over time. I mean, for the second half of the Cold War, India was aligned with the Soviet Union. Strategic autonomy really came out in the context of the nuclear discussion in India and the realization that no country—not the United States, not the Soviet Union—was going to offer a nuclear deterrent to India, and therefore India had to be strategically autonomous at that time.

We can debate the terminology, but I think where there is more clarity is maybe what the nature of the U.S.-Indian relationship today is. It is really an entente cordiale, if you want to go back to a traditional way of thinking about a relationship. And in the pre-nuclear age, this was, in fact, a very common type of set of arrangements that they sometimes called alliances or ententes. But this was really the nature of most close security and strategic partnerships at that time, and it was really only the nuclear age that required this sort of ironclad commitment that characterized what we now think of as U.S. alliances with NATO, and Japan, and others.

On the Russia question, I think, on China, there is no balancing act. India has, in some ways, more serious concerns about China than maybe the United States does, precisely because it’s on the border. And that has, in fact, opened up this room for this U.S.-Indian partnership that we now talk about. I don’t think it’s often appreciated how deep the differences between India and China go, because it’s not just about the disputed border—although that’s the most important manifestation of it—but you have a trade deficit that is larger than India’s entire defense spending, you have very intense competition between India and China in the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean region, you have questions about the broader balance of power and maritime security, China’s relationship with Pakistan, and also on international order issues—it’s China, not any other country, that’s blocking Indian aspirations at the United Nations Security Council or the Nuclear Suppliers Group. I think these differences are structural. They’re well recognized, and that has actually opened up room for this cooperation. That has been appreciated by successive administrations in the United States.

There are two relationships that sometimes rub Washington the wrong way: India’s relationship with Russia and with Iran. And what I would stress with both these relationships—more with Iran, but to some degree with Russia—is that, at least in material terms, they’re diminishing in importance from India’s point of view. Today in the Middle East, India’s most important partners are the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and possibly Saudi Arabia. Whether it’s from an energy standpoint, a people-to-people standpoint, or a security standpoint, Iran is diminishing in relative importance for India. Will India push Iran away? No. But this is the reality of India’s regional relationships.

Similarly, with Russia, prior to 2014, 85 percent of India’s defense imports were from Russia. Its space program was very closely tied to Russia. Indian astronauts were training in Russia, not the United States. Its nuclear program was much more close with Russia than with the United States. That has all changed quite significantly. So the latest figures from [Stockholm International Peace Research Institute] are that less than 35 percent of India’s defense imports are coming from Russia over the recent years. It was the United States that helped launch an Indian astronaut into space recently. The nuclear relationship is also on the cusp of changing quite significantly, subject to Indian liability legislation.

So, it’s not as if India is going to push Russia away because India has other concerns; it wants to retain the existing stock of its defense imports from Russia because its maintenance and state of readiness is intrinsically tied to that relationship with Russia. It’s also concerned about the Russia-China relationship getting too close. And to the extent that India can offer alternatives, it’s actually in the interest of many countries to ensure that India has a continuing line to Moscow. This, by the way, was of use even to the United States—when there were nuclear threats being leveled by Moscow against Ukraine in 2022, India was one of the channels used by the United States to get its message across to Moscow.

But again, if you look at material terms today—in purely material terms—India’s relationship with the European Union is significantly more important from a trade, from an investment point of view––there’s a trade negotiation underway that may be concluded by the end of this year––even security today. So, I think that it’s worth sometimes just laying out these facts and explaining the context, and I find people tend to be quite understanding. They may not agree with India’s point of view, but they certainly come away more appreciative of India’s context.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Ashley, I want to pick up on the third part of your argument, which is about liberalism and the change in the domestic situation in India. You write that "The country is shedding one of its main sources of strength—its liberal democracy—by embracing Hindu nationalism," and you later say that an illiberal India is likely to be less powerful. Describe those changes and how you see them inhibiting India’s rise on the global stage.

ASHLEY TELLIS

So, I think there are two dimensions to that challenge: one is ideational, the other is material. The ideational element is the influence that India had by being this exceptional republic, right? People don’t often appreciate the fact that India was the first large democracy to provide all its citizens––irrespective of sex, caste, gender––instant universal suffrage. In the West, universal suffrage came through a long process of expanding individual rights. India did it in one go at the time that it became a republic, and this represents, really, a hopeful portent for the future. There’s another dimension to this, I think, that is significant, that whereas in most countries, the survival of democracy is linked to the persistence of high per capita incomes, India has maintained its democracy despite being a developing country. And so, from the point of view—if you believe that a liberal international order offers the best opportunity for the global system’s peaceful evolution because it creates opportunities for peaceful change––then India’s departure from its liberal traditions, I think, ends up weakening down. These are all ideational elements.

The material element is simply that if you have to mobilize national power by utilizing every element of your citizenry, but you end up pursuing policies where substantial sections of your citizenry are treated as second-class citizens, then, by definition, less coherent societies are not as effective as more coherent societies. And so, from a purely material point of view, it worries me that as India has embarked on this trajectory of ascendancy, it sort of ties one leg to the stake of illiberalism, and that prevents the kind of effectiveness that we could see. Right now, someone can make the argument quite cogently that, what are you talking about? India has become illiberal, but it has not had an impact on growth rates and so on and so forth. That may well be true, but we do know that India’s internal security burdens are substantial; India’s internal security burdens can potentially grow if you begin to deny the fruits of citizenship to all your inhabitants equally, right? It’s a problem that China has in so many ways, where today, it has an internal security budget that is bigger than its external defense budget. Except that when you are an economy five times larger than India’s, you can bear those burdens much more flexibly than India can.

So, to the degree that Indian illiberalism increases internal discontent and creates fractures within the polity that are otherwise avoidable, illiberalism acts as a drag on India’s progress. And so we are saying this as friends of India, right? Because, at least at this moment, we are very aware of the toll that illiberalism is taking in our own country—so this is not an exercise in finger-pointing. And I was very conscious in the piece to emphasize that the loss of both the United States and India to illiberal movements will have consequences, because I believe that same argument is true for the United States: that if we cannot mobilize power because we are a polarized and divided polity, then it has an impact on our ability to maintain our unipolar standing in the world. So, that is the essence of my argument on the illiberal question.

Now, there are many reasons why liberalism is intrinsically important to India because it provides the best constitutional framework for India to realize its best aspirations, and so on and so forth. But those are advantages that the Indian people enjoy for themselves. And while we can be well-wishers of India on that count, we can’t shape it. But the fact that India’s turn could undermine the global liberal order and all the benefits it brings for our two countries, and the fact that it can impede political mobilization and power mobilization—those are the elements that I hung my argument on in the piece.

NIRUPAMA RAO

In response to what Ashley has to say, I mean, he’s raised some very searching questions on highlighting certain tensions within India’s domestic political trajectory. But to my mind, there may be such internal contradictions, but you have to understand that India is in the midst of a civilizational transition. We are seeking to balance tradition with modernity, pluralism, and nationalism—which is a very rising tide, both in your country and mine—liberalism and majoritarianism. Now, these are real contradictions; but to my mind, they’re not disqualifying. It doesn’t validate any democratic regression—I agree with that—but it helps explain that there is a flux that characterizes India’s domestic and international identity to date.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Dhruva, anything you would add?

DHRUVA JAISHANKAR

I do think sometimes in reading assessments of India’s domestic policy from outside, I notice a few things. One is that sometimes the starting context for a lot of discussion about Indian democracy is very different. There is an imposition sometimes of the U.S. or a European lens. And I often stress that the First Amendment of the Indian Constitution is not the same as the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. In fact, it’s almost the opposite—that Indian notions of liberalism are very different from, say, a French notion of laïcité, which is a very different definition of the relationship between religion and the state. I also think that other things are overlooked: the strength of grassroots democracy, the Panchayat raj system in India, for example, is not something a lot of people are aware of. Many would be surprised that opposition parties in India, until recently, governed states that were home to six of the largest cities in India. Some of this needs to be taken into account when assessing the future. But one more thing—and [political scientist] Devesh Kapur and others have done work on this—but there’s actually been a decline in violent religious riots, for example, not just religious, but communal riots, over the past few decades. So, again, I do think sometimes the reality is much more complex, and these are some things that people need to take into account.

NIRUPAMA RAO

I want to say, I mean, to our friends in the United States, that India is neither a post-colonial pluralist utopia, but neither is it a hardened ethnonationalist state. It is undergoing a civilizational redefinition at the forces of globalization, post-colonial assertiveness, religious and cultural revivalism, and economic aspiration. So, we are really in a state of transformation, but we are not a democracy in denial. We are a democracy in transition.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Dhruva, let me stick with you on one other difference that you have from Ashley. Ashley’s view is that Trump’s skepticism of alliances and questioning of some key pieces of America’s global role is temporary and aberrational. You argue in your response to his essay that Ashley is focused on a world that is vanishing—not because of anything India is doing, but more because of what the United States is doing. Do you think there’s risk to betting on the United States from India’s perspective, just given the instability in U.S. policy? I mean, how does the volatility in U.S. politics play into Indian strategic considerations here?

DHRUVA JAISHANKAR

One of the challenges for all of us who are analysts in the Trump era is distinguishing between the signal and the noise. During the first Trump term, it was interesting to observe in real time what were policies that were likely to survive, and what were policies that were likely to change with the new presidency and a few executive orders being signed. And I think we’re still in the midst of that right now; things that are enshrined in U.S. law—legislation tends to be more difficult for a future administration to change.

That being said, I think there’ve been a few trends that have continued, I would argue, since the late years of U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, and have changed mostly by virtue of the tone and perhaps severity of the policies that followed. So one, the United States has been keen on burden sharing. This is something that, under both Obama and Biden, the United States asked of its NATO allies—we would like to see greater burden sharing on your part. Trump says it in a much harsher way, but I think that that’s been pretty consistent. Two, some degree of skepticism of multilateral institutions. Again, the Biden administration took a more reformist approach to it, but there is that skepticism that the institutions of today are out of date. Three, a skepticism of trade. The United States is no longer going to enter into trade agreements with anyone that involve the United States not increasing access to its market in a non-reciprocal manner. And I think, again, these are areas where there’s been some consistency.

Now, all of this suggests—I’m bringing it back to the question of multipolarity—that the United States and China, while in material terms may, and Ashley’s correct in this, over the next decade—and it’s hard to project beyond a decade—may be in a league of their own. They will both be constrained in their own ways.

And just again, to use Ashley’s own argument, China will certainly and has been constrained by the nature of its government. There have been moments in the past few years where China has not stepped up to its plate in a way that you would expect a country with its material capabilities to have done so, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. But there’ve been many cases after that as well, where China has been somewhat missing in action. With the United States, it’s more a question of choice rather than capability. I point this out in my response to Ashley, that it’s quite remarkable that the United States retains about 26 percent of the world’s GDP today, which is the same proportion as in 1991 and 1992.

So, the United States is an enormously resilient power, but the question is less one of capabilities and more one of will. And will the United States, going forward, even after Trump, be willing to enter into the kinds of arrangements that it did during the Cold War? And it was motivated, again, by this existential competition with the Soviet Union in doing so. Will that continue?

The answer, I think—and we’ve seen evidence of this—is for India to continue to invest in that relationship with the United States. Prime Minister Modi made a very early visit in February of 2025 to meet with Trump to iron out this new relationship with the new administration. So, they’ll continue to invest in that, but, in fact, hedge against the possibility of a more retrenched United States as well, and that means investing in relations with other partners, including many of them United States allies. And you’re seeing that—I was just in South Korea—but you’re seeing a lot more interest in investing in the relationship with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Europe, the Middle East. Not that these will be a single replacement for the United States; it’s going to be very hard to do that, but this is all a hedge against the possibility—which is not an entirely unfounded possibility—of a much more retrenched United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There have been some commentators who have looked at the recent fighting between India and Pakistan and the U.S. response to it as some kind of betrayal by the United States or a response that was overly sympathetic to Pakistan. How do you read the outcome of that war and the U.S. role?

DHRUVA JAISHANKAR

Initially, the United States was actually quite supportive of India, including its right to retaliate against Pakistan. I think India was caught off guard, for reasons that I can only partially explain, on Trump’s announcement on May 10, 2025, taking credit for a ceasefire between the two countries, and his role in that, and why he did that. I think two things that were also somewhat surprising: one was U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s X post saying that India and Pakistan had agreed to wide-ranging talks in a neutral third country—something India says they did not agree to—and also, subsequently, the visit by Pakistan’s army chief to Washington and the seeming consolidation of that mil-to-mil relationship.

Now, I think a few things need to be kept in mind. I think, again, in material terms, coming back to that, the United States doesn’t offer the same level of assistance, nor is it dependent on Pakistan to the same degree as it was prior to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. And again, just the economic constraints that Pakistan is under—and not to mention the Pakistan-China relationship—which remains considerable and deep and, again, quite consequential from a military technological point of view; I think that there will be limits to where that relationship will go. But this is not to discount that it has depreciated the appetite in India for a closer relationship with the United States. Things that would, I think, have been easier to convince people of in New Delhi have become harder.

Now, the question that remains—and this is still an open question, because it depends on steps taken by Washington and, to some degree, India, over the next few months—is this a bump in the road, or is this a deviation? I still sense that at the present moment, it is a bump in the road. Again, trade talks have continued subsequent to that; the Quad has met after that, other, the sort of normal interactions have continued.

And I think another question needs to be raised, which is: how much is this really a difference between India and the United States, and how much of this is a difference between Prime Minister Modi and President Trump? How much is this personal versus a sub-structural question? The trick, I think, for India going forward is how to get across India’s dissatisfaction without doing anything that would harm Indian interests, because there’s nothing Pakistan would like more than for India to, in a peak of fury, cancel some contracts with the United States. Right? So, how not to play into Pakistan’s hands because they’re obviously exploiting certain conditions to create this division between Washington and New Delhi. So I do think it’s a level-headed assessment, but I wouldn’t discount the fact that there’s been a vibe shift in U.S.-Indian relations.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Nirupama, if you were back in your old job as India’s ambassador to Washington, what case would you be making to your American counterparts about changes you’d like to see in America’s approach to India and perhaps understanding of India’s approach that you think are lacking in Washington today?

NIRUPAMA RAO

I’d like to address the questions of perception, and to be able to tell my American interlocutors, in as persuasive a way that I can, that strategic alignment and strategic autonomy are not mutually exclusive. That’s the first point. The second point I’d like to make to my American interlocutors is that we have shared interests; nobody is disputing that, and least of all India. India looks at this relationship very seriously as a partnership of purpose, really—of very strongly defined purpose, which helps our countries. But it cannot be an alliance of obligations. I think the United States cannot be a demanding partner. I think there is a sensitivity within India about that. There is a history to this. So, perhaps we should keep in mind the question of memory, which is always important when you define a relationship. We want this relationship to move forward; there are so many areas. The table is really groaning under the weight of all the good things that are happening in this relationship, so let us partake of this bounty for mutual benefit.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Ashley, if you were once again an American diplomat in New Delhi, how would you make the case for a closer alignment with the United States? How would you make the case for the kinds of policies you would like to see? And what would be, in the near term, some steps that you think India could take in this direction?

ASHLEY TELLIS

I think the foundations of the argument that we started making in 2002, in the face of the distraction of our own government because of September 11, 2001, I think the foundations of that argument still are intact––that the case for seeing greater Indian power and greater Indian prominence in the Indo-Pacific, because it serves America’s interest first and India’s interests along the way––I don’t think there is a repudiation of that claim that is justified. Because, to my mind, if anything, the case has become more compelling, because in the face of the reality of U.S.-Chinese competition—and remember, in 2002, they still had very amicable relations with China, and President Bush, in particular, was very hopeful that we could preserve a balance of power in Asia––as former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, that favors freedom––not simply to prevent Chinese misuse of its power. People focus on that aspect, but equally, because it created the preconditions for continued cooperation. If China could not misuse its power, it had all the incentives to continue with peaceful cooperation. That has become even more important, and that’s where India fits into this U.S. strategy of building up its strength and so on and so forth.

But what I think has changed is, because the realities of competition with China now bear on both of us, we need to move beyond strategies of hedging. We need to move in the direction of building a partnership that can deliver in the context of a crisis, in the context of deterrence, and if worst comes to worst, in the context of a conflict. And what troubles me a little is that the Indian desire to still hedge, despite the changes in its environment, is not allowing the bilateral relationship to realize full fruit. I take Nirupama’s point that India, like the United States, wants to avoid entangling engagements, but the United States had the luxury of avoiding entangling engagements because we were the most powerful entity in the Northern Hemisphere, even at that point. We would become even more powerful in time, and we had no enemies in close proximity. India does not have that luxury.

And because we have a forward position in Asia and allies that we have to defend by treaty, we don’t have that luxury, so we really need to make this partnership more effective. So I would come back to things that I mentioned in passing earlier on, which is that we have to make the defense relationship much more productive. It cannot be simply endless conversations among leaders and [the] occasional purchase and occasional exercise. I think we need to put in place institutional structures by which we can support each other.

I’ll give you a simple example. We have an agreement with India now to repair U.S. warships in Indian ports. It’s something that I advocated inside the government for a long time. And when Admiral Michael Gilday was the [chief of naval operations], he brought it to completion. But it’s not obvious to me that that agreement, for example, would hold in times of conflict; it’s not obvious to me that India might not see that agreement as provocative, even if it was not involved in a conflict, as providing a form of material support to the United States when it’s important.

I would like to overcome humps of this kind, and there are so many other areas where, if time permitted, we could go into granular detail. The economy—I mean, the character of U.S.-Indian economic relations—for all the gains made, we are simply not at a level that we should be for countries of our aggregate economic size. It’s really unfortunate that we are at this moment today, where we have two political parties in the United States that are both anti-trade. And even though India has moved in the direction of signing so-called free trade agreements, they are Swiss cheese agreements. They’re not real free trade agreements. And we are going to get an agreement with India in the next few weeks if we’re lucky and Trump gets around to signing what has been on his desk now for close to four weeks. But even that is not going to stimulate U.S.-Indian trade to the level that it should be.

So, I would say at least in those two areas, to start off, we need to build foundations for a much deeper partnership. See, the disagreement that we are having here, I think, is a disagreement that manifests itself along three dimensions: the first is, I see the threats posed by China as being so serious, and India’s capacity to respond being sufficiently stymied that it cannot afford to essentially diversify at the expense of building a privileged relationship with the United States.

The second dimension is the character of the alignments that we would like to forge and what its implications are for India’s freedom of action. I think we need to be realistic here. This isn’t national politics. No one’s doing favors for others without getting something in return.

India can pursue multi-alignment. India can pursue relations with other states. But I can’t see how it can maintain a productive relationship with the United States if some of those relationships undercut core American objectives, and that will require what, in international relations theory, we used to call an exchange of considerations. Right? We have to do much better there.

And I think the third area where we have a disagreement is whether we can build something despite the transformations in our own societies. And I think Nirupama is suggesting that we might be able to pull that off because these are larger macro-level shifts that are taking place in India and possibly the United States. She may be right; I hope she’s right, but I worry that they will actually impede our ability to build the partnership we want. And at the end of the day, to my mind, if the United States and India cannot hang together in protecting liberalism globally, we both come out weaker than we should be.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Ashley, thank you for writing the original piece. Nirupama, Dhruva, thank you both for the thoughtful and incisive responses. And thanks to all three of you for joining me today. Your debate can be read in our forthcoming issue. It’s online right now, so I encourage everyone to go read in more detail what we’ve been talking about today. Thanks so much.