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.

Meanwhile, the United States and India must also achieve more advanced cooperation on counterterrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement, based on the recognition that terrorism is a central threat to both countries. This means, among other things, working more closely to disrupt the flow of funds to terrorists. We also urge India to participate in our Container Security Initiative (which, among other things, allows the United States to check suspect U.S.-bound cargo containers at their foreign ports of departure) and to unleash its proven expertise in information technology to meet a new generation of threats from cyberspace.

The second major challenge is for the United States to help India address some of its most urgent domestic problems, particularly in agriculture and education. When Prime Minister Singh first met with President Bush in 2005, he expressed a strong desire to work with the United States on a second green revolution to help India's rural poor. This is an urgent task: despite India's progress, nearly 700 million of its citizens -- 25 percent of the world's poor -- live on less than $2 a day. Americans such as the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Norman Borlaug were key actors in India's first green revolution, and Prime Minister Singh has suggested that the United States' famous midwestern land-grant institutions could assist India through the implementation of public-private partnerships, market-oriented agriculture, and new agricultural methods. U.S. private-sector expertise and investment could help India create the cold-storage facilities, supply chains, and food-processing technology that form the backbone of a sophisticated agricultural market. The two countries could also collaborate on spreading environmentally sustainable farming methods, such as land conservation and water-resource management.

As India's rural poor become integrated into global markets, the United States and India must also find a way to bridge differences on global trade. We have differed with India on critical issues during the long Doha Round of trade negotiations. We continue to believe that the completion of the Doha Round talks offers the best hope for expanding global economic growth and prosperity. An Indian global trade policy that increases liberalization and stimulates significant and sustained trade in agriculture and manufactured goods would benefit all, and so would the opening of India's retail, banking, and insurance sectors.

As with agriculture, the United States helped establish some of India's finest educational institutions, including one of the Indian Institutes of Management and one of the Indian Institutes of Technology. Now an even more ambitious education agenda with India is needed. Education has been and will be a driving engine of U.S.-India relations -- it will constitute the foundation of a shared future and be a wellspring of personal relationships and dreams that go far beyond government-to-government cooperation. There are now more students from India at colleges and universities in the United States than there are students from any other country. Graduating Indian students have spawned new businesses, with new technologies and extended families that build new bridges between our countries. As India looks to expand educational opportunity for its citizens, the United States will be ready to cooperate. The announcement that the Georgia Institute of Technology will open a campus in India and the variety of joint ventures being considered are signs of much more to come. On the government side, we have agreed to expand the Fulbright Program in India and the exchange of scholars between the United States and India.

The third major area in which the two countries must work together more effectively is energy and the environment. If global climate change will be the most significant challenge of the future, India and the United States must face it together. The United States and China are currently the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, but India is about to join us in that inauspicious grouping. India has traditionally seen global warming as a developed-world problem and has argued that a country's responsibility for it ought to be measured in per capita, rather than absolute, terms. That will have to change. How a hugely populous and rapidly growing India addresses its energy needs is a question whose answer will have urgent consequences for the global environment. Even with clean nuclear energy in the future, India will need additional energy sources to fuel its growth.

Part of the solution will come from drawing on the strengths of the United States and India as increasingly dynamic, creative, and high-tech societies. As the United States invests in alternative energy sources, it can partner with India, home to some of the world's most innovative initiatives: the production of biofuels, the expanded use of compressed natural gas in public transport, and the world's most profitable wind energy company. Indian and American business leaders, scientists, and engineers must become a major part of the solution to the challenge of global climate change. We have already begun that process through the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which seeks to accelerate the development of clean energy technologies and bring together the public and private sectors to tackle this critical challenge. India is also a charter member of the major economies group that met at the State Department in September 2007 to plan for an effective post-Kyoto global regime on climate change.

The fourth major challenge is to work with India more effectively to promote freedom and democracy worldwide. Standing up for people who have not yet secured their right to have a say in their government should be an essential component of the new U.S.-India relationship. Truly moving forward on promoting democracy will require new ways of thinking, and both countries will need to make some tough choices, commensurate with their global responsibilities.

Some of India's fellow nonaligned countries are among the world's most oppressive and antidemocratic regimes. India's defense of those countries in resolutions at the United Nations and its political and military cooperation with some of them -- most notably Burma -- is anachronistic. Burma is a cruel dictatorship, and its continued detention of the heroic dissident and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who lived in India in her youth and studied at the University of Delhi, serves as a rebuke to all who believe in democratic values. India will also need to be careful about its long-term relationship with Iran. Indians will need to ask themselves if their civilizational link with the Iranian people shall be confused with support for the interests of the irresponsible theocratic regime in Tehran.

For its part, the United States must adjust to a friendship with India that will feature a wider margin of disagreement than we are accustomed to -- but a friendship in which the extra effort will be made up for by rich long-term rewards.

Finally, the United States and India should work together more effectively in the United Nations and other multilateral organizations, which I believe will play a larger role in our interdependent world in the future. It remains a curious irony that our ability to work together bilaterally has far outdistanced our sometimes contrary and disputatious work together at the UN. We must find a way to trust each other more and work in common cause in the world's global forums, and to do so with other rising democracies, such as Brazil and Indonesia. The United States welcomes the rise of a responsible, active India that engages on these issues. We urge the world to understand that international institutions, including the UN, will need to adapt to permit a greater leadership role for a rising India.