On July 11, 2024, two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had concluded his first visit to Moscow since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Eric Garcetti, the United States Ambassador to India, said, “In times of conflict there is no such thing as strategic autonomy; we will, in crisis moments, need to know each other.” When Mr. Modi was in Russia, on the eve of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Washington, the Joe Biden administration had expressed its “concerns” publicly. “We have expressed those [concerns] privately, directly to the Indian government and continue to do so,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson said.
President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan joined the debate on July 13 by telling MSNBC that “a bet on Russia as a long-term, reliable partner is not a good bet... Russia would side with China over India any day of the week”. There were reports in the U.S. media that U.S. officials had asked New Delhi to postpone Mr. Modi’s Moscow visit as the NATO summit was to begin on July 9, but India decided to go ahead with the plan, which “disturbed” the Biden administration.
Stress points, historical overview
While the overall trajectory of the strategic partnership between India and the U.S. seems steady, stress points have appeared in the relationship in recent years. Of these, the most consequential was India’s refusal to toe the western line vis-à-vis Russia on the Ukraine war. While the U.S. and its allies imposed economic sanctions on Russia and supplied weapons worth billions of dollars to Ukraine to fight the invading troops, India maintained its strategic partnership with Moscow, expanded its energy cooperation and refused to condemn the invasion at international fora, even as it called for bringing the war to an end and show respect towards the territorial sovereignty and integrity of all countries. For India, this was a neutral position, but in the West, this was seen as economic support for the Russian President Vladimir “Putin’s war”. This caused wrinkles in the India-U.S. partnership, which has widened over the past two and a half years. The public comments by top U.S. officials earlier this month were the sharpest manifestation of the persisting stress points.
Ambassador Garcetti’s comment that strategic autonomy is meaningless during the time of crises goes against the very premise of strategic autonomy. A simple definition of the concept is that countries should be able to make decisions that best serve their national interests, irrespective of the pulls and pressures from other parties. There are two elements in this concept. The first is the inherent conviction that a nation is capable of taking decisions that serve its interests. The second is that the nation should have the will and the resources to take those decisions even in the face of high pressure. So, if India is not able to take autonomous foreign policy decisions during the times of “conflict” and “crisis moments”, as Mr. Garcetti has said, it is not exercising its strategic autonomy.
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All Indian governments since Independence have followed strategic autonomy in one form or the other, whether it is called non-alignment, multi-alignment, multi-directional foreign policy or strategic autonomy. And they did not follow this as a dogma but as a foreign policy approach to the country’s interests in a choppy international system. A conventional understanding about India’s foreign policy was that it was too idealistic in the initial years to understand the currents of power politics. But non-alignment and Asian solidarity, as envisaged by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and others, helped India, a newly decolonised republic that was born into a bipolar global order, mobilise voices in the Third World and stay out of both blocs and pursue its interests and those of the newly decolonised countries. This gave both a moral footing and pragmatic levers to India’s foreign policy.
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India initially stayed equidistant to both the capitalist and the communist blocs. But after the U.S. formed new treaty alliances in Asia (Pakistan became a member of both the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO and the Central Treaty Organization, or CENTO) and China moved closer towards the U.S. after breaking up with the Soviet Union, India began building stronger ties with Moscow, but without forfeiting its strategic autonomy. And when the Soviet Union and the communist bloc collapsed by 1991, India chose greater integration with the global economy and closer strategic partnership with the West.
Great power rivalry
From India’s point of view, the global order is again changing. The U.S. remains the world’s most powerful country but the world order is no longer unipolar. China, already the world’s second largest economy, is rising as a strong competitor to America’s global primacy. Russia is challenging the western security architecture in Europe, militarily. In West Asia, a shadow war between Israel, an American ally, and Iran, a close Russian strategic partner, is heating up. In an anarchic order, India wants to strike a balance between great powers without joining any alliance system. And for this, maintaining its strategic autonomy is essential.
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The Russia policy is a case in point. While energy ties with Russia are largely opportunistic and driven by cheap prices (India’s crude imports from Russia jumped from $2.4 billion in 2021-22 to $46.5 billion in 2023-24), the defence partnership is structural. Russia is the source of over 40% of India’s defence imports, and 86% of the Indian military’s equipment is of Russian origin. This cannot be undone overnight. Russia is also an important partner in continental Asia where India works with Eurasian powers for economic progress, connectivity and tackling security challenges.
To be sure, Russia’s deepening ties with China alter the essence of India’s historical partnership with Moscow. But it is also an opportunity to recast the India-Russian partnership as a more equal bilateral partnership — during the Cold War it was heavily lopsided — where both sides would be mindful of each other’s sensitivities. India would not like to see Russia, cut off from the West, going completely into the Chinese embrace, and Moscow would like to have multiple options rather than putting all its eggs in one basket of the ‘Middle Kingdom’. If India were part of any alliance systems, such as Germany, for example, which had to silently accept the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline which it part owns, India would not have the strategic space to pursue its partnership with Russia, while staying a closer partner of the West. Here, autonomy plays a major part.
Positive-sum game
The U.S. need not see this as an unfriendly foreign policy choice. India is not a disruptive, revisionist power. It supports a multilateral global order, and that is because it wants the international system to be more representative in line with the geopolitical realities of the present. The world is already multipolar, economically, but a similar transition has not taken place in its power dynamics. India wants to improve the system where its voice, and that of the Global South, would be heard with greater interest. For New Delhi, strategic autonomy does not call for isolationism. It calls for greater engagement with different power centres rooted in informed national interest. Theorists of strategic autonomy do not look at foreign policy as a zero-sum game, where one party gains something at the expense of others. For them, it is a positive-sum game, where everyone gains. For example, India’s energy trade with Moscow made sure that Russian crude kept flowing into the market, helping steady global oil prices. Its close cooperation with Russia can also act as a speed breaker in Moscow’s quasi-alliance with China, which the West sees as the only “revisionist” power that has the capability to rewrite the existing global order.
On strategic autonomy
Unfortunately, India’s partners in the West, who are agitated over New Delhi’s Russia ties and its emphasis on strategic autonomy, do not appreciate the bigger picture. This is the unipolar mentality — you are either with us or against us. This approach was not quite successful even during the unipolar era, as the two-decade-long war against terror would testify. How is it going to work, post-unipolarity?
stanly.johny@thehindu.co.in
