The Return of the Raj:Partner with India

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The Return of the Raj



C. Raja Mohan
It is not clear what French President Nicolas Sarkozy had in mind when he invited a contingent of 400 Indian troops to march down the Champs-Élysées for the Bastille Day parade in 2009. But Paris might be on to something that Washington has missed, in spite of its more intensive military engagement with India in recent years. Although Paris does not have the power to engineer international structural changes in New Delhi's favor, it has often been ahead of Washington in strategizing about India. In its effort to build a partnership with India, ongoing since the mid-1990s, France has helped India renegotiate its position in the global nuclear order: It provided diplomatic cover

when India defied the world with nuclear tests in May 1998, promoted the idea of changing the global non-proliferation rules to facilitate civilian nuclear cooperation with India, and worked with the Bush Administration to get the international community to endorse India's nuclear exceptionalism.
Of course, Sarkozy's motives might have been merely tactical: a move to butter up Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was among the honored guests at the parade, or to raise its share of India's rapidly expanding market for advanced arms. But Paris is capable of more than tactics: It may sense the prospects of a fundamental change in India's defense orientation and its potential to contribute significantly to international security politics in the 21st century. It may see that a rising India, which runs one of the world's major economies and fields a large armed force, will eventually bear some of the military burdens of maintaining the global order.

If so, it would not be the first time that India has done so. Western analysts, some British excepted, seem not to appreciate two historical facts: that the Indian armed forces contributed significantly to Allied efforts in the 20th century's two world wars; and that India's British Raj was the main peacekeeper in the Indian Ocean littoral and beyond. And it is not just the West that is ignorant of the security legacy of the British Raj; India's own post-colonial political class deliberately induced a collective national amnesia about the country's rich pre-independence military traditions. Its foreign policy establishment still pretends that India's engagement with the world began on August 15, 1947.

The image of Indian troops marching in Paris should remind the world that India's military past could be a useful guide to its strategic future. If the United States and India can together rediscover and revive the Indian military's expeditionary tradition, they will have a solid basis for strategic cooperation not only between themselves but also with the rest of the world's democracies. The Bush Administration showed an instinctive sense of this possibility when it committed itself to assisting India's rise and boosting its defense capabilities. President Barack Obama does seem to have a fund of goodwill toward India, which was reflected in his decision to receive Prime Minister Singh in November 2009 as the first state guest at the White House. But it is not clear if the Obama Administration has a larger strategic conception of the prospects for military and security cooperation with India.

In general, the Democratic administrations of recent times have tended to define engagement with India in terms of global issues and multilateralism rather than converging bilateral interests. Rather than frame the relationship with India using such ambitious but unrealizable multilateral goals, or drag Delhi further than it wishes to go into the Af-Pak mess, the Obama Administration needs to elevate the bilateral military engagement with India to a strategic level. While the U.S. debate on military burden-sharing has traditionally taken place in the context of Washington's alliances with Western Europe and Japan, a rising India may well be a more credible and sustainable partner than these two in coping with new international security challenges. If both sides can shake off the remaining historical baggage that has kept them at arm's length for most of the past sixty years, we may see something remotely like the return of the Raj.

A good deal of that old baggage has already been discarded. More Americans than ever now see beyond India's third-worldish rhetoric and appreciate its quiet affection for power and realpolitik. Ever more Indians appreciate the genuine opportunities for strategic, economic and political partnership with the United States and the West in general. This appreciation accelerated dramatically during the tenure of the Bush Administration, having just come off a stretch of poor relations during the Clinton years.

Although Indian opposition to the "liberal wars" of the 1990s was couched in terms of sovereignty and non-intervention, the real problem for India was the potential threat of American meddling on the Kashmir question. India faced an intense insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir supported from across the border beginning in the late 1980s, a serious effort by Pakistan to "internationalize" the dispute, and the Clinton Administration's constant hectoring on India's nuclear efforts and human rights. Unsurprisingly, India resolved to resist these new "Wilsonians" in the security debates following the Cold War.

Eventually, Washington figured this out. The Clinton Administration in its final year, and the Bush Administration throughout its tenure, sought to make amends and develop a new level of political understanding between the two nations. Clinton stepped back from linking improved ties to progress on Kashmir and non-proliferation. The Bush Administration fell almost completely silent on Kashmir and put an end to nearly four decades of Indo-U.S. quarreling over nuclear issues. It also exerted itself to prevent an Indo-Pak war in the winter of 2001–02. Taken together, all of this opened the way for constructing a new security partnership.

Having initially raised fears that it might undo the good work of the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration has since signaled that it will avoid destabilizing activism on the Kashmir question, will not let the deepening U.S. engagement with Pakistan undermine possibilities with India, and will elevate the relationship with Delhi to what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called "India-U.S. 3.0."1 But although Secretary Clinton has spoken of cooperation on global security as one of the pillars of the U.S.-India relationship envisaged under the Obama Administration, she has been hesitant thus far to construct a case for a defense partnership.

The Raj Legacy
That defense partnership is no longer a bridge too far, and I believe that it may come to resemble the strategic profile of the British Raj. A genuine partnership between Washington and New Delhi can reconstitute in the 21st century the "India Center" that organized peace and stability in much of the Eastern Hemisphere during the 19th and early 20th centuries.2 And it will be a more effective partnership than that of Empire and Colony, for the United States has no desire to inflict such limits on Indian potential. The Raj legacy contains four key elements, each of them subject to creative renewal in the 21st century.

The first of these elements is the expeditionary tradition that accompanied the creation of modern armed forces by the Raj. The armed forces under colonial rule initially focused on domestic constabulary functions and the defense of ever-shifting frontiers, but beginning in the late 18th century the Raj also put them to expeditionary use.3 Through the 19th century, Indian troops saw action in theaters ranging from Egypt to Japan, from Southern Africa to the Mediterranean. Despite growing nationalist opposition, British use of Indian armed forces surged in the first decades of the 20th century. During the Great War, nearly 1.2 million Indians were recruited for service in the army. When it ended, about 950,000 Indian troops were serving overseas. According to the official count, between 62,000 and 65,000 Indian soldiers were killed in that war. In World War II, the Indian army saw action on fronts ranging from Italy and North Africa to East Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. In Southeast Asia alone, 700,000 Indian troops joined the effort to oust Japanese armies from Burma, Malaya and Indo-China. By the time the war ended, the Indian army numbered a massive 2.5 million men, the largest all-volunteer force the world had ever seen.

Yet, as I noted earlier, modern India's political leadership has been reluctant to recognize the contributions of its men to the making of the modern world. The Indian national movement was deeply divided in its attitudes toward the Indian army under British rule. These divisions became sharper as the movement confronted the meaning of World War II and the political choices it offered. While the Indian National Congress, speaking as the principal vehicle of the national movement, condemned the "imperialist war", individual leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru backed the Allied war effort against the fascists. Further accentuating India's ambivalence, an "Indian National Army", led by Subhash Chandra Bose, used Japanese assistance in an effort to forcibly liberate India from the British. It was no surprise, then, that the divided national movement could not leverage the Indian army's extraordinary contribution to the Allied victory in the negotiations with the British on the terms of independence, the distribution of the spoils of the war and the construction of the postwar international order. As the Indian leadership confronted many security challenges immediately after independence, it is perhaps understandable that it momentarily forgot this complex history.

A second legacy of the Raj is the "military surplus" in the Subcontinent, which has endured despite all the political changes of the past six decades: partition, permanent Indo-Pak conflict, the occupation of Tibet by China and the resultant Sino-Indian military tensions on the Indo-Tibetan border. Despite these challenges, the now-separate armies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have made an important mark on international security politics. That the South Asian armies, including those of Nepal, contribute nearly 40 percent of the world's peacekeepers underlines the region's role as a military reservoir. But this extraordinary role is widely overlooked in international debates on peacekeeping, particularly in India's case.4

A third legacy of the Raj is a security system for the smaller states of the Subcontinent. Britain constructed a glacis around India that involved the creation and maintenance of a set of protectorates and buffer states from Persia to Siam through Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Burma. If Partition ruptured the strategic unity of the Subcontinent and enormously weakened the so-called "India Center" in Asian security affairs, then the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Russia, and the re-emergence of a centralized China, likewise chipped away at the presumed primacy of New Delhi in the region. In seeking to preserve that status, independent India revived the British Raj's protectorate arrangements with Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim in 1949–50. Sikkim was eventually integrated into India, and New Delhi saw itself as responsible for both the external and internal security of the Himalayan Kingdoms. From direct military intervention to coercive diplomacy, India used a variety of measures to prevent the internal and external destabilization of its smaller neighbors. India's military interventions in East Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and its coercive diplomacy to promote federalism in Sri Lanka and democracy in Nepal, are best seen in this context.

The fourth legacy bears similarity to Great Britain's efforts to prevent, first, France and, later, Czarist Russia, from encroaching on the Subcontinent in the much celebrated Great Game. Namely, India claimed an exclusive sphere of influence in South Asia. An Indian version of the Monroe Doctrine for the Subcontinent, aimed at preventing other major powers from intervening in the region, became an integral element of India's policy.5 It also argued that its own conflicts with neighbors should be managed in a bilateral rather than a multilateral context and viewed with great suspicion the interests of major powers in its neighborhood. To the extent it could, too, New Delhi prevented its neighbors from granting military bases and facilities to great powers.

The influence of India's Raj inheritance was somewhat tempered, however, by its relative economic decline in the decades after independence. Delhi simply could not sustain the Raj legacy within the Indian Ocean littoral. In Southeast Asia and the Gulf, it largely abandoned its traditional security role. Even within the Subcontinent, the attempt to sustain the glacis was not entirely successful: Note, for example, China's occupation of Tibet, its growing influence in South Asia and Burma, Russia's intervention in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's alliances with Washington and Beijing. As India's economic growth gathered momentum in the 1990s and its relations with the great powers began to improve, Delhi initiated policies aimed at re-asserting a privileged role in all the subregions abutting the Subcontinent (the Gulf, Central Asia, Southeast Asia) and, more broadly, the Indian Ocean littoral.

Reconfiguring the Raj
Well before the notion of India's rise was even debated or accepted, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that India had the potential to emerge as one of six major powers of the post-Cold War international system.6 He recognized that independent India had internalized the strategic logic that had driven the Raj's policies in the Indian Ocean, arguing that India's

goals are analogous to those of Britain east of the Suez in the 19th century—a policy essentially shaped by the Viceroy's office in New Delhi. It will seek to be the strongest country in the subcontinent, and will attempt to prevent the emergence of a major power in the Indian Ocean or South East Asia.
Whatever the day-to-day irritations between New Delhi and Washington, Kissinger became convinced a decade ago that India's "geopolitical interests will impel it over the next decade to share some of the security burdens now borne by the United States in the in the region between Aden and Malacca."7


While most American analysts considered such an outcome a remote prospect at the time, Kissinger's two basic propositions—that India will behave like the British Raj and that there will be room for burden-sharing between Delhi and Washington in the Indian Ocean arena—have been borne out to some extent. When India changed its economic orientation in the early 1990s and embarked on a high-growth path, it arrested its postwar marginalization in Asia and the Indian Ocean. Given its size, an India that could produce an annual economic growth rate of 7–8 percent was bound to acquire the basis for a vigorous regional diplomacy. Such rapid economic growth easily provided for annual defense expenditures of 2–3 percent of GDP, which are large enough in aggregate terms to modernize India's military capabilities.

After an extended period of economic growth, India's regional security strategy took on not only new momentum but a new name as well: "neo-Curzonian", a reference to the expansive policies of the Raj under Lord George Curzon, the Viceroy in Calcutta at the turn of the 20th century. As Parag Khanna and I have argued:

A neo-Curzonian foreign policy is premised on the logic of Indian centrality, permitting multidirectional engagement—or "multi-alignment"—with all major powers and seeking access and leverage from East Africa to Pacific Asia. Such a forward foreign policy emphasizes the revival of commercial cooperation; building institutional, physical and political links with neighboring regions to circumvent buffer states; developing energy supplies and assets; and pursuing multistate defense agreements and contracts.8
Most assessments of Indian foreign and security policy have confirmed the growing Indian capacity and will to project power (hard and soft) throughout what Delhi calls its "extended neighborhood", a concept that now includes all subregions in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific littoral.9

As India's military capabilities grew and the Bush Administration reached out to Delhi, a new basis for bilateral security cooperation took shape. This would not have been possible without the Bush Administration's "de-hyphenation" of India-Pakistan relations, which produced a new level of mutual trust between Washington and Delhi.10 Both sides began to take steps in the defense and security realm that, although small, went against the grain of the bilateral relationship of the past. For its part, India offered the U.S. military access to facilities immediately after 9/11. The U.S. government, which needed the Pakistani army's cooperation to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan, declined the Indian offer. Looking for other ways to lend political support to U.S. operations in Afghanistan, India escorted U.S. naval ships participating in Operation Enduring Freedom through the Malacca Straits in 2002. In 2003, the Indian government vigorously debated the U.S. request to send troops to Iraq. While Delhi eventually backed off, fearing a domestic political backlash, the fact that it considered such a deployment at all was significant.

When the tsunami disaster hit the eastern Indian Ocean in December 2004, India quickly decided to join forces with the navies of the United States, Japan and Australia to provide relief and rehabilitation. In June 2005, India signed a ten-year defense framework agreement with the United States that involved broad-ranging bilateral cooperation as well as participation in multinational military operations. Although the left-liberal Indian opposition attacked Delhi's departure from the previous policy of participating only in UN-sponsored operations, the government held to its agreement with the United States.

The agreement was also significant for another reason: It was the first time India identified a broad range of cooperative military missions that it could undertake with a major power. Throughout the Cold War, India had deliberately limited its military engagement with Russia to weapons acquisition and had refrained from any service-to-service exchanges, joint exercises or joint missions. That India was now willing to do all these things with the United States signaled Delhi's transition from non-alignment and military isolationism to cooperative security engagement with other powers.

The U.S. government, in turn, promised to raise India's power potential. After decades of partnering with India's regional rivals, Pakistan and China, the Bush Administration intensified U.S. military engagement and opened its weapons store to India. At a time when the United States was unwilling to sell arms to China and prevented its European partners from doing so as well, one did not need to go to great lengths to explain the proposition of assisting India's military rise. The Bush Administration made a strategic assessment that the emergence of a militarily powerful India was in American interests, especially in hedging against the potential negative consequences of China's rise. The second term of the Bush Administration brought rapid expansion in the frequency and quality of joint military exercises with India. The U.S. government also agreed to sell the first ever military platforms to India: the USS Trenton amphibious transport ship (now called the INS Jalashwa), C-130 military transport aircraft and the P-8 maritime reconnaissance aircraft. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are both bidding for the Indian plan to purchase 126 advanced fighter aircraft, a contract said to be worth $10 billion, which would make it one of the largest arms deals in history.

The stage was thus set for a rapid expansion of Indo-U.S. defense cooperation under George W. Bush, but the pace of action was slowed somewhat by the inability of the two sides to negotiate a range of supplementary agreements on mutual support in logistics, a framework for secure military communications, and end-use monitoring agreements for weapons and technology acquired from the United States. The bureaucratic delays were due in part to American unwillingness to be flexible in accommodating Delhi's hypersensitivity to any language that might suggest an unequal relationship. The visit of Secretary of State Clinton to India in July 2009 produced the long-awaited breakthrough on end-use monitoring and opened the door to significant arms transfers from the United States to India.

Although the Obama Administration has started off on a positive note with India, it is not yet clear where it wants to go with the new defense possibilities. To be sure, U.S. companies would be delighted to sell more arms to India and explore opportunities for long-term defense-industrial collaboration with Indian firms. The U.S. armed forces are pleased with their substantive interactions with their Indian counterparts. Yet there is little to suggest that President Obama and his top advisers share the two basic convictions of the Bush Administration: that a militarily powerful India serves long-term U.S. interests, and that the two nations can work together to stabilize the Indian Ocean littoral and insure against future attempts at domination by China. To be fair, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a holdover from the Bush Administration, has talked of India's positive role as a "net security provider in the Indian Ocean and beyond."11 But as we have seen with the civil nuclear initiative, imaginative moves toward India cannot be sustained without a strong presidential commitment to override bureaucratic nitpickers in Washington. Meanwhile, the middle levels of the Obama Administration and the liberal Democratic establishment would be happy to return America to the old ways of dealing with India, either through the South Asian prism or through the global multilateral agenda of non-proliferation. Add henpecking about global warming, and it will be all too easy to lose sight of the strategic possibilities that are at hand with India.

While Af-Pak issues and the global agenda are indeed important in the advancement of the Indo-U.S. relationship, progress on the bilateral defense/security agenda is the key to Delhi's willingness to cooperate with Washington across the board. The idea that India is exceptional and must be dealt with on its own terms is difficult for most Washington liberals to accept. If Obama is willing to bet on this proposition, which guided his predecessor's policies toward India, he will find in Manmohan Singh a partner who is ready to work with the United States in constituting a post-colonial Raj that can bear the burdens of ordering the Eastern Hemisphere in the 21st century.
 
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ajtr

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Importance of Maritime Co-operation with India and Geo strategy finds place in the 2010 USQDR
MIL, Apr 24, 2010
Mohan Balaji

New Delhi: India - April 24, 2010 - Two months after the release of the 2010 United State's Quadrennial Defense Review, which acknowledged India's rise in as a militarily power in the Asia Pacific and the dominant role that Indian Navy could play in years to come, the six-day visit of US Navy chief Admiral Gary Roughead to India ahead of the annual India-US naval 'Malabar' exercise marks significance.

Released every four years, the USQDR chalks out the strategy for the US Defense Forces. "The distribution of global political, economic and military power is shifting and becoming more diffuse. The rise of China, the world's most populous country, and India, the world's largest democracy, will continue to reshape the international system," US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said while releasing the 128 page USQDR 2010. The 2010 is a war time QDR and it's the third consecutive since 2001 and 2008.

Though, the USQDR talks extensively about the ongoing US militarily operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, from India's perspective there are some important points to be noted.

For skeptics in Indo-US relations, after Obama came to the White House, there needs no any further answer on how important that India finds in the scheme of things in the US policy decisions than by just glancing at the QDR released on February 2010. The USQDR emphasized that for US to retain its position as the most powerful actor, it must boost up cooperation with its key allies and partners to sustain peace and security.

To start with US is primarily a country whose eminence depends on its ability to control the oceans around the world. The school of thought started out nearly 135 years ago with the vision of the great US Naval officer nearly by named Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan advocated that the sea power—the strength of a nation's navy—was the key to strong foreign policy.

Mahan's vision to see things further is amazing since in his work " The Problems of Asia" published in 1901, he predicted that China with its size, mass and population could pose challenge to the US. In Mahan's time there couldn't have been many to put their money on China's rise. Mahan was also lucky his voice was heard in the US political establishment when he started writing on Naval affairs. Since his friend and Assistant Secretary of Navy Theodore Roosevelt went on to become the President in 1901. Further, Mahan's thoughts were understood in the political establishment what with the great American President during the World War II Franklin Delano Roosevelt also had an Assistant Secretary of Navy during World I under President Woodrow Wilson before he became President in 1933. The US political establishment understood that for US to be a super-power it needs to control all the oceans in the world.

The US strategic thinking understands this thought and that is why it reaches out to India as the Centre Stage of the 21st century in the Indian Ocean. The US's grand strategy needs India in the Indian Ocean as much as it needed the United Kingdom in the 20th century in the Atlantic Ocean. This is clearly buttressed in the QDR 2010.
Further, in the US grand strategy of "Balancing of Power" India is the vital cog to contain China in the Indian Ocean and so further in the greater Asia Pacific region.

This was emphasized in the QDR US that India will emerge as the key security provider in the Indian Ocean and beyond. The USQDR is a strategy driven document.
As per the report, India will play the most influential role in global affairs as its economic power, cultural reach and political influence increases. "This growing influence, combined with democratic values it shares with the United States, an open political system, and a commitment to global stability, will present many opportunities for cooperation," the 2010 USQDR said.

If the report is anything to go by it outlines a blue print for the "Concert in Asia" with the US providing a balance act. Nothing illustrates better than the proposed trip of US President Barack Obama to Guam base to June 2010. Though the scheduled trip got delayed because of Obama's commitment to the Health Care legislature the importance of Guam stop over trip of Obama en route from Indonesia to Australia emphasizes the importance of Indian Ocean in the years to come in Washington's overall geo-strategy.

Security Analysts and policy makers in India need to take two important points from the USQDR. First it is about how to handle counter-insurgency and second the importance of Indian Ocean in the years to come.

Nothing illustrates better than the above point but by understanding that the brain behind the 2010 USQDR is considered to be the President of the Center for a New American Center, Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) John A. Nagl. John A Nagl is the author of the book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2002) and played a prominent role along with current Commander of the U.S. Central Command, General Petraeus in authoring the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (2007). John A Nagl has talked and written on how the US Army/ Marine Corps can learn the lessons in counter-insurgency from the Indian Army's experiences. The 2010 USQDR talks about the ongoing counter-insurgency operations initiated by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. John A Nagl had borrowed on British Imperial Army's counter-insurgency lessons in India to be put in effect in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Second, the importance of Navy in the USQDR can be understood by the fact that the present Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen comes from a Naval Background. It's for the first time that a USQDR is released when a Naval Officer occupies the post of Joint Chief of Staff after 1996 QDR was the first review requested by the Congress following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In this year US Budget heavy investment has been made on US Navy. The USQDR 2010 says that the US Naval Forces will continue forward positions in the years to come which means that Indian Navy can push to be taken itself on the board.

On the other hand, one needs to understand that 2006 QDR was released by then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld who just quit his post months after releasing the report.

However, the present Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates is being retained from the former Bush administration. Obama is the only US President besides another Democratic one, Bill Clinton to have the Secretary of Defense from the opposite party since World War II. This emphasizes that the US' overall strategic approach has not changed drastically from the earlier Bush administration as some skeptics in India view. Robert Gates was appointed as the Secretary of Defense by George W Bush after the exit of Rumsfeld. Gates is considered to have a "realist" political outlook unlike the conservative Rumsfeld. However, Gates has called for vastly expansion the military's missions through the 2010 QDR.

Economically, it is being understood that this QDR is released to when the US is bogged down in Iraq, Afghanistan and fighting a financial recession. The USQDR is followed by a for $708 billion defense budget in the year 2010. The request is higher than at any point in US history since World War II, higher than both during the Korean War in 1952-53 and Vietnam War peak budget in 1968.

The QDR calls for even more Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Now the big question is how the US will be able to sustain forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan kind of situations and operations in upcoming years to come. In that context, it needs a partner which can both assist in its military operations. It is understood that the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations cannot be extended further in Asia. To stretch matters further, the US is bogged down with 400,000 US military personnel in forward-stationed or rotationally deployed around the world.

Further, in a historical co-incidence, 2010 USQDR emphasizes the point of National Correspondent for The Atlantic and a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, Robert Kaplan's article in the Foreign Affairs March/ April 2009 titled "Center Stage for the 21st Century," which talked about the rivalry in the Indian Ocean between India and China, and how the US could play the balancing role.

Interestingly, Indian Ocean accounts for the highest tonnage of transportation of goods in the world, with nearly 100,000 ships transiting its expanse annually. In the waters of the Indian Ocean, nearly 2/3 thirds of the world's oil shipments and 1/3 cargo traffic are carried annually. This emphasizes the importance of the Indian Ocean in the 21st century.

In a same way, the great American Diplomat George Kennan published an article titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs magazine in July 1947. The article formed the basis of US's containment strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and ultimately led to the failure of Communism.

The highlight of the Robert Kaplan's 2009 article was that the South China Sea is full of energy wealth that the Chinese wish to exploit. It is the Pacific gateway to the Indian Ocean. It frustrates the Chinese to no end that the U.S. Navy is present there to the degree that it is. US Navy cannot be solo over the region and it needs a partner and India can afford to be one.

On the other hand, the worst case scenario for the US will be the increase in the list of failed states in Eastern Africa and piracy in the Horn of Africa. QDR 2010 talks about those situations in which the US troops will be dragged in the failed states like Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Horn of Africa, countries such as Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia fall in the above categories.

Presently, The Indian Navy escorts Indian-flagged cargo vessels through the Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa. Indian Navy's presence there has resulted in the decrease in the incidents of piracy. Also, the U.S. forces are working in the Horn of Africa to provide training, equipment, and advice to their host-country counterparts on how to better seek out and dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks. A greater co-operation between Indo –US forces should be pushed ahead. Specifically, "The United States has a substantial interest in the stability of the Indian Ocean region as a whole, which will play an ever more important role in the global economy. The Indian Ocean provides vital sea lines of communication that are essential to global commerce, international energy security, and regional stability. Ensuring open access to the Indian Ocean will require a more integrated approach to the region across military and civilian organizations," says USQDR.

Indian political establishment needs to grabs the present moment. The first step in the right direction will be to enhance more naval to naval co-operation. The 2010 Malabar series of exercises is scheduled from April 23 to May 2. The USQDR emphasizes the importance of India's Maritime stretch in the years to come especially from the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Hormuz.

India will do itself great help if it could establish a tri-service command in the Arabian Sea just like the present one in the Andaman and Nicobar. This will help India to project its might in the Horn of Africa and in those East African states where the need arises.

After all, the US geo-strategy is based on the concept of the 20th century geo-strategist and the "god father" of the containment strategy, Nicholas John Spykman who propagated that "Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia; Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world." Typically, the rim land refers to the maritime fringes of the Eurasian continent.

Spykman also emphasized that US needs partners in the rimland to counter any rise of the Heartland (Soviet Union) or the Middle Kingdom (China). There is no prize for guessing on why 2010 USQDR implicitly talks about the importance of having India as a strategic partner to balance the power of China in the Eurasian Continent.
The above article is written by Balaji Chandramohan, an international journalist. He can be contacted in his email id [email protected], [email protected] )
 

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This is an important point - The western world is in economic trouble - and needs new avenues to generate wealth. The Chinese are far too independent to be relied upon. But India, with its slavish elite and confused commoners, will do quite nicely. The western elites would find it much harder to support Pakistan unless they can make money from India.

Interestingly, the lead story in that issue of the "American Interest" magazine is a piece by C. Raja Mohan entitled "The Return of the Raj" confirms the reasons for British Empire rising. India is the link a country between Europe, Middle East and Far East. The British Empire was built on the relationships and take over of trading routes of the India sub-continent. The two world wars eclipsed Great Britain and the US stepped in without the intellectual knowhow. They took surface phenomenon to be real and marched full speed a head. End of Cold War and 9/11 has opened their eyes to what the whole thing is about. Walter Russel Mead is a famous policy wonk. He belongs to the Realist school of Foreign Policy. BTW US has finally caught on to how the British Empire was built. It needed informers to keep them appraised of Indian society and Indian thoughts. In old days of EIC it was the merchant class (Jagat Sheth, Nanda Kumar, etc), princely class and babu log (Hurre Babu in Kim and real life ones). After Independence the British links got reduced but since the 70s (after East of Aden policy) the US stepped in. And they have spent the last 40 years trying to build new set of relationships : mainly in academia and media. The article by CRM is an example of the new interlocutors.
 

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Horizontal Asia
Anthony Bubalo & Malcolm Cook
Conventional wisdom now intones that the 21st century will be the Asian century, with power shifting inexorably away from the West toward that vast and, for many Westerners, rather vague entity called Asia. If this is the case, and there are grounds for believing it is, we need to clarify what exactly (or even approximately) we mean by "Asia."

Geographical terms do not in themselves change the lines on maps, but they do shape conceptions and, consequently, behavior. "Asia" is certainly a term whose meaning has changed with historical circumstances and their contexts. In the heyday of Western imperialism, "Asia" typically referred to everything from Suez to Shanghai, with a particular emphasis on those parts of Asia readily accessible to Western navies and merchant ships. But by the third quarter of the 20th century, a series of events—the War in the Pacific, the rise of a communist regime in China, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the economic ascent of Japan and the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore)—both narrowed what we took to be "Asia" and underlined its growing importance. For most purposes "Asia" came to mean the north-south coastal region extending from Korea to Indonesia. The fact that the West's key strategic interaction with the continent was via American naval power reinforced this vertical, maritime conception of Asia, as did late 20th century efforts at regional organization. Often expressed in the concept of the "Asia Pacific", this particular geostrategic artifice created some odd legacies: Asia's preeminent economic and political body, APEC, includes Chile but not India, Mexico but not Mongolia.

The vertical idea of Asia has now outlived its usefulness and serves to obscure reality rather than illuminate or shape it. We are not alone in this belief. Robert D. Kaplan sees the return of an old idea of Asia as a "continent reconfigured into an organic whole" that emphasizes its east-west connections. India's leading strategic commentator, C. Raja Mohan, speaks of the revival of a Curzonian perspective in Indian foreign policy that also views Asia in whole-of-continent terms. As these ideas gain currency, however, there is risk of encouraging the adoption of one half-truth at the expense of another. Perhaps the most prominent variation thus far on the theme of Asia's strategic reorientation is one focused on the Indian Ocean. Kaplan anticipates a competition there between the naval fleets of Asia's two emerging powers, China and India. James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara argue that China's growing naval reach prefigures its eventual adoption of Mahanian precepts emphasizing the importance of maritime power. The popular "string of pearls" thesis anticipates China building a ring of bases in the Indian Ocean.1
 

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