Modi's US visit spotlights America's policy choices.
By James M.
Dorsey
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Indian Prime
Minister Narendra Modi's four-day red carpet
visit to the United States constitutes a microcosm of what a 21st-world order century
will likely look like.
The visit
spotlights the adjustments the United States faces in transitioning from a
US-dominated unipolar world to a multipolar world populated by three major
powers – the US, China, and India -- and several middle powers with greater
agency to hedge their bets and chart independent courses.
Those adjustments
include the viability of a foreign, defense, and security policy anchored in
alliances rather than more narrowly-focused agreements and micro-laterals like I2U2, which groups the United States,
Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and India, or AUKUS, a trilateral security
pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
I2U2 was
created last year to facilitate "joint investments and new initiatives in
water, energy, transportation, space, health, and food security."
In an interview with The Wall Street
Journal this week,
Mr. Modi asserted that the South Asian nation's quest for great power status based
on being the world's most populous country and, by 2030, its third largest
economy, did not involve "supplanting any country.“
Instead, Mr.
Modi said, "We see this process as India gaining its rightful position in
the world."
The prime
minister noted, "I am the first prime minister to be born in free India.
And that's why my thought process, my conduct, what I say and do, is inspired
by my country's attributes and traditions."
A former US
State Department official and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's
Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs, Ashley J. Tellis, argued that India and the
United States differ on what a 21st-century world order should
entail.
The Tata
family, whose Tata Group is India’s largest conglomerate with operations in
more than 100 countries, funds Carnegie and the chair.
India “does
not harbor any innate allegiance toward preserving the liberal international
order and retains an enduring aversion toward participating in mutual defense.
It seeks to acquire advanced technologies from the United States to bolster its
own economic and military capabilities… It does not presume that American
assistance imposes any further obligations on itself,” Mr. Tellis said in a recent Foreign Affairs article.
Bolstering
Mr. Tellis’ argument, prominent Indian commentator C. Raja Mohan noted that "the
Indian argument of ‘strategic autonomy’…is only deployed in the engagement with
the US. ...We rarely
ask how Delhi, despite the talk of strategic autonomy, has allowed a massive
and unhealthy reliance on Russian weapons to develop over the decades."
Widely
viewed as India’s most popular politician rooted in Hindu nationalism with a
track record of illiberally hollowing out the world’s largest democracy and
rolling back minority rights, particularly regarding India’s 200 million
Muslims, the world’s largest Muslim minority, Mr. Modi stands firm in the
struggle to shape the 21st-century world order.
That battle
is as much a power struggle as it is a battle of ideas.
“Ideologies
play a central role in structuring international orders as well as mounting
collective efforts to challenge and transform them,” scholars Gregorio Bettiza,
Derek Bolton, and David Lewis noted in a recent journal article.
Challengers, they said, “tend to
organize around alternative beliefs and values.”
Juxtaposed
with the Biden administration’s democracy vs. autocracy framework, Mr. Modi’s
model of illiberalism combined with non-alignment while maintaining close ties
to the world’s major economies is increasingly a preferred alternative for
autocratic middle powers, particularly in the Gulf, according to Middle East
expert Jon Alterman.
US National
Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on the eve of President Joe Biden’s White
House meeting with Mr. Modi that the US leader would not lecture the Indian prime minister
about human rights.
“Ultimately,
the question of where politics and the question of democratic institutions go
in India is going to be determined within India by Indians. It’s not going to
be determined by the United States,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Mr. Alterman
suggested, “That is precisely the conclusion that officials in Riyadh and Abu
Dhabi and Cairo—and others—would like Washington to reach about them. They
would like to have the US president welcome
their rulers without lectures or preconditions.”
India’s appeal as a model for authoritarians and autocrats is
not simply self-serving.
It also benefits from the fact that credibility
is essential in the battle of ideas. Credibility is what the United States
lacks.
The effective dropping of human
rights concerns in the US-India relationship is just the latest example of the
United States refusing to put its money where its mouth is or, at best, its
selective adherence to its democratic and human rights values.
Earlier, Mr. Biden lost ground by
framing the Ukraine war as a fight between democracy and autocracy rather than
what resistance to the Russian invasion is about: upholding the rule of law and
the inviolability of internationally recognised borders.
Mr. Biden’s problem is that
inconsistency in US policy has become as much a liability as it long was an
asset. The rise of illiberalism in the United States, symbolised by former
President Donald J. Trump, compounds Mr. Biden's difficulties.
To be sure, balancing values with the
requirements of big power geopolitics produces uncomfortable compromises.
The United States has yet to attempt
to regain credibility by countering legitimate allegations of hypocrisy and
opportunism with a well-argued rationale for selective insistence on its values
that for decades have rung hollow and insincere.
Mr. Raja Mohan, the Indian
commentator, put his finger on the US dilemma by noting that “if Washington can
do business for many decades with the House of Saud, the Pakistan Army, and the
Chinese Communist Party, it is unreasonable to think it will be squeamish about building on
clearly convergent interests with the Modi government.”
Thank you for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed today’s
column and podcast. Twice-weekly, my syndicated column and podcast offers an
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you, take care and best wishes.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning
journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological
University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of
the syndicated column and podcast, The
Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.
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