'No one's seeing India as a counter to China'

Q&A/ Edward Luttwak

Internationally-renowned strategist Edward Luttwak, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, was in India for a week, at the invitation of the government, under the Distinguished Visitors Programme.

The Romanian-born scholar, earlier a consultant with the US Secretary of Defence, Department of State, and the National Security Council, lectured selected Indian officials on US-India relations and the US-India defence partnership. Luttwak is known for his offbeat and thought-provoking ideas, authoring well-known works such as Coup d'etat: A Practical Handbook, and Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.

A conservative hard-liner, Luttwak supported every US intervention from Vietnam to Afghanistan , but warned against the invasion of Iraq. Luttwak spoke to Business Standard about his views on India. Excerpts:

What are the changes you see from 20 years ago, when you last visited India?

As a superficial observer, 20 years ago India had a catastrophic internal airline system. There were overbooked flights, cancelled flights, irregularity, unpredictability. Today, India has a better domestic airline service than you have in Western Europe or the US. Only Japan has a comparable service in terms of abundance, quality and so on. It affects few Indians but it most certainly affects India's relationship with the outside world, whether it is a tourist or an investor. That's called a revolution.

How do you see India's strategic repositioning of the previous decade, and its new relationship with the US?

I think India's best friend has been Russia and not the United States. Relations with the US have been improving a lot in the past few years. If they continue to improve, we are going to be India's best friend. India has some hardcore leftists who don't even know why they are anti-American. They wake up in the morning and they are anti-American. Some of them are even trying hard to be pro-Iranian. Can you imagine waking up in the morning as a progressive leftist and pro a government that executes 10-year old girls. This is not an Indian speciality, we have this in Italy, we have this in France. This is a cultural phenomenon. The large message is that the democracy of India has to live with this and cope with this and manage with this. I don't think anyone is going to say the foreign policy of the government of India for the past 20 years has been a ridiculous foreign policy. It is notable how you make a transition from one political party to another "" a very important transition for the world that was "" and you had continuity in foreign policy. If you had stepped back and said this is what the BJP did and now we are going to do the opposite, that would have been a catastrophe. That would have been Latin America "" that is how they do it.

There is concern in India about being set up by the US as a counterweight to China. Does the US see that?

It's a valid fear in the abstract, but not in practice. I don't know anybody serious in Washington who has any idea, or concept, or vision of building up a relationship with India to use against China. The people who are obsessed with the China threat are isolationists, not internationalists. When they talk about China threat they say, "that's why we need a big navy, the Chinese navy is building up, they have 3,700 ships." Most of them are as good as row-boats but never mind. The people who talk China threat in United States are marginal. American strategy succeeds and triumphs not by setting India against China or vice versa "" it is by having a good relationships with both and, therefore, any sensible American policy would welcome any improvement in the China-India relationship because it makes it easier to maximise relations with both.

You have recommended to Indian officials that India buy the most advanced US high-technology weaponry, but that requires big money of the kind that India cannot afford to spend.

They are big bucks, but nothing is more expensive than investing all that you have in old systems. And the old systems in air power get completely overtaken quickly. You can buy a 10-year-old rifle and you'll make a small difference, but you buy the wrong generation aircraft and you are out. Also, you can't recover anything from that. If I was the Indian Air Force, I would go to an international bank and borrow money, order 200 pieces of (the most futuristic systems that are still on the drawing board). I would give the manufacturers the economy of scale, urge them to joint ventures all over the place, make alliances with everybody, manufacture those aircraft and lease them.

What do you see as the big challenge in the US building a relationship with India?

We have an anti-Pakistan party in Washington today, we have an anti-Iran party, we have an anti-Portugal party, we even have an anti-Denmark party. But we don't have an anti-India party. The problem is that despite this we have recently had the P3 episode (a US proposal to lease P3 Orion maritime reconnaissance aircraft to India), where Americans had proposed to lease them and they were sabotaged "" both bureaucracies managed to co-operate to wreck the deal. You can have goodwill in a cultural broad national sense, you can have two governments that agree to do something and yet it failed and will leave a bad taste because of the failure to crack the bureaucracy. The relationship between India and America will remain about fashion and IT unless we can solve the problem of the bureaucratic interface in your defence and our defence, and this will only happen when there is a big deal.