INDO-AMERICAN DEFENCE COOPERATION: NEITHER A MIDAS TOUCH NOR A POSITIVE SUM SOLUTION

The rapidly changing defense environment confronting India continues to pose daunting challenges to the national policymakers particularly in relation with the USA, the hitherto leader of the post-cold war global order, bent on promoting more aggressively “America first” approach.

- DR. GOURI SANKAR NAG AND ARPAN BHATTACHARYA

A combination of internal and external factors as well as state and non-state based threats has also created a ‘threshold concept’ (from uncertainty into impending crises) that has complicated the matrix of defense relationship between the two giant nations. Despite the confusion about the meaning of security in the 1990s, India sought to wrestle with the complexities to achieve its own strategic autonomy. As India could register growth to scale up significantly in the global status hierarchy over the last two decades, its defense policy with the USA, much like its foreign policy, came increasingly to reflect the twin strings of navigation accommodating the realist undertone of unmistakably strategic turn on one hand and the liberal impulse of ‘status-seeking approach’ logically inclined towards ‘multi-level alignment’ by ruling out exclusive teaming up with the US.

There is no gainsaying the fact that the cold war initially destabilized the Indian strategic aim in many different ways. It wanted to disrupt by causing an unproductive diversion of resources from economic cooperation to military competition, thus reducing the level of development assistance India could have otherwise mustered and, thus imposing heightened defense burdens on New Delhi at a time when it could not afford them. The USA’s support for Pakistan and its reapproahment with china, despite their rivalries with India became the most acute exemplification of this problem. The mutual US – Indian quest for a strategic partnership during the cold war was repeatedly frustrated by such externalities. India’s response to this reality that American priorities were different from its own didn’t help improve the cause.