In a sea of uncertainty, risk, and challenge, there’s at least one bright spot for U.S. foreign policy: India. Fueled by affinities of principle and practice, the U.S.-Indian partnership is on a sure yet smooth upswing — just at the sort of moment it’s needed most.
Strategic conditions elsewhere in the world have become unfavorable on even deeper levels than are commonly considered. In addition to the relatively obvious geopolitical advantage to closer collaboration between the United States and India, there are more complex and significant cultural benefits touching on the most powerful trends in commerce and technology. Some of these benefits make it easier for the U.S. to go on offense in areas of primary concern. Some of them, perhaps even more importantly, beef up America’s strategic defense capabilities.
To begin with, a firmer and more enduring U.S.-India alliance helps move American policymakers and strategists away from two equally shaky models. Both the “pro-European” model favored by those on the left of center and the “Anglosphere” favored on the right have pronounced weaknesses.
In the first case, the differences between the U.S. and Europe are so much more significant than the similarities that the Continent can no longer be treated as the stable point in the international order that liberals have assumed, right up to the end of the Obama presidency, that it must be. Nor is the U.S. about to close the gap. Even if Trump is completely repudiated at the end of his term, the U.S. is not going to port over Scandinavian-style social democracy or wind up facing the same sorts of structural economic and cultural challenges as the continental Europeans.
While close working relations with Europe must not be abandoned, the full weight of U.S. world policy cannot be placed on the shoulders of that relationship. American policymakers must be prepared for that relationship to bear even less weight in the future. In the search for an alternative, India looms large.
In the second case, the Anglosphere is clearly no longer a viable substitute for Europe as a partner in organizing world power and economics on terms stably favorable to the United States. While Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain itself of course remain core U.S. allies, the truth is that India is America’s linchpin English-speaking ally, without which the rest of the former British Empire is very likely too weak to be counted on in the sort of crisis the U.S. is most likely to face in the immediate to short term.
Britain especially is in a weak spot, torn between a desire to disappear into Europe and to withdraw into its own political attic. The right is divided and confused, while the left is increasingly united under the fantasy that a defunct strain of socialist labor ideology can break open a window onto new forms of solidarity and justice. While Britain will probably not completely collapse as a regional power any time soon, in its diminished state it is no competition for India — not the India of today, and certainly not the India of tomorrow.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi knows these things. “In an uncertain global economic landscape, our two nations stand as mutually reinforcing engines of growth and innovation,” Modi wrote in a high-profile Wall Street Journal editorial. “Confidence in each other’s political values and a strong belief in each other’s prosperity has enabled our engagement to grow. A vision of joint success and progress guides our partnership.”
Although these considerations underscore the significance of a deepening political partnership, Modi’s eye is fixed — as that of U.S. policymakers should be — on commerce and culture.
“The logic of our strategic relationship is incontrovertible,” Modi noted. “It is further underpinned by faith in the strength of our multicultural societies that have defended our values at all costs, including the supreme sacrifices we’ve made in distant corners of the globe.”
In conclusion, Modi avowed, “the next few decades [will] be an even more remarkable story of ambitious horizons, convergent action and shared growth.”
What is only implicit in Modi’s remarks, however, and what Americans should closely bear in mind going forward, is that, while both U.S. and Indian strains of liberal democracy have come under recent criticism for tending more toward executive prerogative and the power of personality, the ongoing transformation of democracy by digital technology and digital habits of life will show the leadership style of a Trump or a Modi (or, perhaps, a Macron) to be more compatible with freedom protections than the changes to come.
Neither rights language nor constitutionalism issues forth from the habits of digital life — a reality that gives a potentially dramatic global advantage to, for instance, China, the most powerful competitor faced by India and the United States alike.
While neither the U.S. nor India should have any interest in a direct general war with Beijing — such a confrontation would, in fact, mark a horrible failure of policy — both allies do want to demonstrate that English-speaking liberal democracies are able to work in concert to manage the transition into digital civilization more fruitfully than the world’s most powerful autocratic regime.
James Poulos is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.