America's Strategic Opportunity With India

The New U.S.-India Partnership

R. Nicholas Burns

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007

Summary:  The rise of a democratic and increasingly powerful India is a positive development for U.S. interests. Rarely has the United States shared so many interests and values with a growing power as we do today with India. By reaching out to India, we have made the bet that the future lies in pluralism, democracy, and market economics.

R. NICHOLAS BURNS is U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

As we Americans consider our future role in the world, the rise of a democratic and increasingly powerful India represents a singularly positive opportunity to advance our global interests. There is a tremendous strategic upside to our growing engagement with India. That is why building a close U.S.-India partnership should be one of the United States' highest priorities for the future. It is a unique opportunity with real promise for the global balance of power.

We share an abundance of political, economic, and military interests with India today. Our open societies face similar threats from terrorism and organized crime. Our market-based economies embrace trade and commerce as engines of prosperity. Our peoples value education and a strong work ethic. We share an attachment to democracy and individual rights founded on an instinctive mistrust of authoritarianism. And in an age of anti-Americanism, according to the most recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, nearly six in ten Indians view the United States favorably.

In the past decade, both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush recognized this opportunity and acted to construct a completely new foundation for U.S. ties with India. Our relationship with India now is our fastest-developing friendship with any major country in the world. I have visited India eight times in the last two years to help construct this partnership. I have seen firsthand the remarkable growth in trust between the leaderships of the two countries. I have also observed the corresponding explosion in private-sector ties, the greatest strength in the relationship. The progress between the United States and India has been remarkable: a new and historic agreement on civil nuclear energy, closer collaboration on scientific and technological innovation, burgeoning trade and commercial links, common efforts to stabilize South Asia, and a growing U.S.-India campaign to promote stable, well-governed democracies around the world. And the United States is only just beginning to realize the benefits of this relationship for its interests in South and East Asia.

Still, there are obstacles that the United States and India need to overcome before they can attain a true global partnership. The two countries need to work more effectively to counter terrorism, drug trafficking, and nuclear proliferation. Progress so far has shown how effectively we can work together to settle past differences and meet future challenges. If it is sustained, we will have an even greater opportunity to put American and Indian principles and power together and shape a more stable, peaceful, and prosperous global community.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

The realization of this vision of a broad U.S.-India friendship has long eluded U.S. presidents and Indian prime ministers. When India broke free from the British Raj 60 years ago, it was entirely reasonable to think that the United States would become one of India's foremost friends and partners. President Franklin Roosevelt had been an ardent champion of India's cause; many Americans saw the vision of the United States' separation from the British Empire reflected in the hopes and dreams of Indian freedom fighters.

But despite some successes in those early years, U.S.-India relations during the postwar period consisted largely of missed opportunities. The two countries found a common connection as large multiethnic, multireligious democracies. The United States was India's largest aid donor in the first decades after its independence; collaborated on India's extraordinary "green revolution," which helped end India's famines; and rushed military assistance to India during its border war with China in 1962. Yet none of this was enough to bridge the chasm of the Cold War. From the American point of view, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's nonalignment policy and warm relations with the Soviet Union made close political cooperation unachievable, and Nehru's mostly autarkic socialist economic policies limited trade and investment ties. President Richard Nixon's "tilt" toward Pakistan in 1971 and India's "Smiling Buddha" nuclear test in 1974 planted the United States and India squarely on opposite sides of the political and nonproliferation barricades.

As is so often the case with proud and great countries, this rather bitter history overwhelmed efforts to mend fences and postponed the long-desired partnership between India and the United States. Even as the Cold War came to an end, Washington focused on deepening its alliances with Europe and Japan and engaging a rising China. India was left off the list of U.S. foreign policy priorities.

But all that is history. Over the past 15 years, three significant developments have helped bring about the recent dramatic strengthening of U.S.-India ties. First, the end of the Cold War removed the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as the principal focus of U.S. foreign relations and the rationale for India's nonalignment policy. Second, India's historic economic reforms of the early 1990s, led by Manmohan Singh, then finance minister and now prime minister, opened India to the global economy for the first time and catalyzed the extraordinary boom in private-sector trade and investment between the United States and India that continues today. Finally, as the twenty-first century began, the global order started to undergo a tectonic shift, and India's emergence as a global force was obvious for all to see.