Diplomacy attaches great significance to words. While words are no substitute for deeds in international relations and what you do is more important than what you say, there are times when what is said can be significant if it presages what is likely to be done. Beat reporters may have been disappointed by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit because it did not produce any headlines about deals and deeds, but foreign policy analysts will pay greater attention to Ms Clinton’s words, especially her speech in Chennai. This is the first time a Democratic Party politician has laid out the wider canvas within which the US sees its relations with India. This wider canvas was first sketched out in a famous 2000 essay penned by Ms Clinton’s illustrious and learned predecessor, Condoleeza Rice in Foreign Affairs in which she offered a new US perspective on India that subsequently came to shape former US President George Bush’s strategy and helped deliver the India-US civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement. Unlike the Republican Party, the Democrats never fully embraced this new view of India. Worse, both President Barrack Obama and Ms Clinton did not enthusiastically support the deal as senators. Coming to office in the context of the 2008 financial crisis and confronted by the problem of global imbalances, the Obama Administration reached out to China and even floated the “G-2 theory”, that the US and China could run a new bipolar world as partners rather than adversaries. President Obama went to the extent of legitimising China’s interests in South Asia.
While the Obama visit to India in 2010 tried to make amends, the relationship lost its strategic edge when everything began to be viewed in transactional terms — how many jobs can India create in the US and how many fighter jets can India buy. In turn, India too went through a phase of complaining and criticising and carping about the relationship. By returning to the grand vision of Ms Rice and defining the India-US relationship in terms of the evolving dynamic of the Asian and Asia-Pacific region, Ms Clinton has once again taken the bilateral relationship away from the transactional paradigm to the higher platform of grand strategy. The US has come to accept India for what it is — a nation lying at the cultural and economic crossroads of Asia and the Indian Ocean region. India occupies a vital strategic position between the energy- and resource-rich regions of Central and West Asia and Africa, on the one hand, and the newly industrialising economies of China and the Asia-Pacific region, on the other.
It is a Curzonian view of India. Ms Clinton recognised that India has had economic, social and cultural links with the entire Asian land mass. Contemporary India has core economic interests in Asia to its east and west, given the dependence on imported energy and exported labour power, apart from the growing trade and investment links. The US and India have many shared economic and strategic interests in this entire region and both would benefit from working together. The challenge for the Indian government is to forge the required domestic political consensus in favour of what is clearly a strategic policy that serves India’s national interests, and also ensure that it retains the required strategic autonomy to always act in the nation’s best interests.
