Not a Chinese Century, An Indo-American One
China’s three decades of explosive growth and increasing influence on the global stage have often led to talk of the country dominating the 21st century. But Daniel Twining, an Asia specialist at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, argues that democratic values and strategic interests shared by India and the US could upend this expectation as the two countries pull closer together.
Not a Chinese Century, An Indo-American One
The strategic alienation of India from the United States was one of the great anomalies of the Cold War. The rapprochement of the world’s biggest democracies from 2000 to the present is one of the key dividends of the new world order that emerged after the end of US-Soviet rivalry and the dawning of the modern era of globalization. India, which will soon have the world’s third-largest economy and its largest population, is increasingly central to the future of the global order; the US National Intelligence Council has called it the decisive “swing state” in the international system. India’s posture is thus central to the long-term position of the US and other democracies.
Yet India was once marginalized from the world order. From independence in 1947 through the end of the Cold War, structural constraints imposed by the US-Soviet global rivalry, India’s pursuit of non-alignment and internal development and security challenges made it difficult for a desperately poor country with an economy growing at only 1-2 percent annually to play a wider international role. India is only now making an impact on world politics after effectively sitting on (or being relegated to) the sidelines. India’s awakening could change the world as profoundly as has the rise of China, and for the better.
From Low Profile to Player
India’s low international profile during the second half of the 20th century was in fact an historical anomaly: during the British colonial period, the Raj was the strategic keystone of a global empire. Under the British Empire, Indian armies served in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and China. Indian wealth — India’s economy was the world’s second largest, after only China’s, until the early 19th century — underwrote Britain’s imperial ambitions and catalyzed British industry in ways that ultimately made it possible for a small island nation to stand down a more powerful Germany in two world wars. Indeed, in the early 1940s, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was convinced that Britain could keep up the fight against the Axis powers even if German forces occupied England — thanks to the manpower, materiel and geopolitical reach of its Indian empire.
India helped the Allies win the Second World War, although the ideals of freedom for which they fought energized the Indian independence struggle. From 1947, independent India pursued its own course of Soviet-style economic centralization at home and non-alignment abroad, which later morphed into a tacit alliance with the Soviet Union as Washington tied up with Indian adversaries Pakistan (from 1954) and China (from 1971). As a result of this, New Delhi pursued foreign policies that isolated it from the world’s developed democracies.
China’s supply of advanced nuclear and missile components to Pakistan beginning in the 1980s contravened Beijing’s NPT obligations but the West looked the other way, thus reinforcing Indian perceptions of the great powers’ hypocrisy and hostility to India’s legitimate security requirements. This sentiment was crystallized when US President Bill Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, meeting in Beijing, jointly condemned India’s 1998 nuclear weapons tests and called for tough international sanctions. That India’s leaders justified the tests with reference to the growing threat they perceived from China, which Clinton’s 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review had identified as a potential peer competitor to the US, only intensified the irony of the American position.India was further alienated by Western support for a global order that appeared to discriminate against it. Unlike China, India was excluded from membership in the United Nations Security Council. Because China tested nuclear weapons before the international non-proliferation regime took effect while India did not, China’s nuclear arsenal was legitimized, and its right to nuclear weapons and trade affirmed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). By contrast, India’s later nuclear tests rendered it a “rogue state” under international law, subjecting it to sanctions on technology trade that undercut its security and limited its economic prospects.
