An insecure partner

US National Security Strategy raises concern

The United States (US) administration has released its 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS), which lays out the parameters within which the US will engage with the world in future. On some levels, the NSS makes for comforting reading for New Delhi, in that the country is referred to as an ally, and China as the US’ solitary “threat”. Indeed, the focus seems to be on competing with China and only on containing Russia, an attitude which will not be completely unwelcome in India in that it preserves some distance between how Moscow and Beijing are treated — a major strategic aim of Indian policy. However, the Indian government should not be completely content with the NSS. In fact, the broader message from the NSS is that it underlines that the US may not be as reliable a partner for India’s development aspirations as it was in the past.

Several shifts in the NSS from previous iterations of the exercise explain why the US’ status should be revised in India’s own estimation. For one, the emphasis on shared democratic values with which President Joseph Biden entered office has been strongly undermined in this document. In it, the US commits to also working with non-democracies that do not broadly seek to weaponise supply chains or resources, intervene in other countries’ internal affairs, or seek to move sovereign borders. By and large this does not clash with New Delhi’s own worldview or approach. However, it is also somewhat incoherent — since, for example, Washington has no problem working with authoritarian states in West Asia that may be guilty of all three of the above. More importantly from India’s perspective, it shifts the parameters of the US’ overseas engagement away from shared democratic values. And it was the latter that has been the driver of India-US relations thus far. It remains to be seen the extent to which India and the US’ shared interests in China can substitute. So far, other than in the purely security sphere, shared interests between India and the US have been an inadequate replacement for shared values.

The economic basis of India-US relations may also face difficulties. The NSS underlines the turn inwards that has been a characteristic of the US since 2016, across both Republican and Democratic administrations. The fundamental claim of the NSS is that the US’ security and an edge in the competition with China are best assured by targeted investment at home. This is fundamentally different from, for example, how it won the Cold War against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, when it was understood that shared investment across the free world was fundamental to the systemic edge that it would achieve over the socialist bloc. The vast amounts of money that the US has set aside for its own industrial policy over the next 10 years are, therefore, not likely to be matched by equivalent investment in the developing world, for example. This is short-sighted — especially since the NSS is also a basically protectionist document that exaggerates the effects of globalisation on the US working class and the environment, and also reveals an unwillingness to open up the American market. A US without a concrete economic proposition to offer is a much less attractive — and, therefore, insecure — partner to the developing world.