India is key to rescuing Joe Biden's troubled foreign policy legacy

Brahma Chellaney, opinion contributor, The Hill

History will probably remember the president Joe Biden for his disastrous military withdrawal of Afghanistan, which helped restore the Taliban to greatness, and for deeply involving the United States in the war in Ukraine, only to see Russia gradually expand its influence. territorial gains.

But its most troubling legacy, which threatens to undermine America's global pre-eminence, has been to push historic rivals China and Russia into a de facto strategic alliance. This unnatural partnership is the result of Biden's failure to pit China against Russia, despite his investments in personal diplomacy with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Creating a wedge between Moscow and Beijing has long been at the heart of American grand strategy. This helped the United States win the Cold War, not militarily, but geopolitically. By co-opting China from the 1970s into an informal alliance oriented towards Containing and rolling back Soviet influence and power, the United States established a two-on-one competition that contributed to the Soviet Union's imperial expansion and, ultimately, the triumph of the West in the Cold War without direct armed conflict.

But today, the United States has become the bridge that unites China and Russia. Xi and the Russian president Vladimir Putin portray America as a aggressive hegemon with a Cold War mentality. They share a vision reshape the world by ending the era of Western domination. Putin and Xi also appear to provide cover the expansionism of each.

Simply put, a two-on-one geopolitical contest is back, but with America as the beneficiary. Therefore, an overextended United States seriously risks accelerating its relative decline in strategic overtaking.

The Sino-Russian understanding underscored the strategic imperative for America to forge an informal alliance with another nuclear-armed giant: India.

The decades-long rivalry between India and Beijing dates back to 1951 in China. annexation buffer Tibet and the resulting Sino-Indian border war in 1962. In recent years, China and India have been locked in conflict a tense military standoff along their long Himalayan border.

India, now the worlds Fastest growing major economyhas a huge market that has become increasingly important to U.S. exporters given the rise of China. booming engine of economic growth and the deepening demographic crisis. The United States needs India as an economic and geopolitical ally, especially if it wants to avoid strategic overtaking and prevail in its exacerbated rivalries with China and Russia.

This explains why there is bipartisan support in Washington for closer ties with India. Indeed, successive presidents since Bill Clinton have cultivated closer ties with New Delhi, with each administration leaving relations in a stronger state than they inherited.

However, under Biden, relations between the world's two most populous democracies have become increasingly strained, leading to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent meeting with Xi. The meeting, coinciding with an India-China conflict agreement on border patrol to ease their military standoff, reported a thaw in the icy hostility that characterizes relations between the Asian giants.

The US-India strategic partnership holds the key to counterbalance China's hegemonic ambitions and maintain the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region, the emerging economic and geopolitical center of the world. Thus, by pushing India to seek a thaw with Beijing as a hedge against American unpredictability, Biden compounded his mistake by contributing to the construction of a Sino-Russian axis.

Tensions with New Delhi have emerged over a range of issues, starting with Biden's capitulation of Afghanistan. Terrorist militia raised in Pakistan. Tensions have increased with India's neutral stance on the Ukraine war. In an unsightly attempt to bully New Delhi submitted, the White House in 2022 threat that the costs and consequences for India would be significant and long-term if it refused to take sides in Ukraine.

The authoritarian tone of the Biden administration struck a chord in India, particularly when he recently asked that it will not be fully satisfied until New Delhi provides meaningful accountability for what the United States claims was a failed 2023 plot to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a New York-based man. Sikh separatist who is on India's most wanted list. But the United States has not taken any action against Pannun for making terrorist threats against India, including warn passengers not to fly Air India between November 1 and 19, an advisory which coincided with a wave of fake bomb threats against Indian carriers who disrupted air transport.

In fact, the growing role terrorism-glorifying Sikh separatists based in the United States and Canada are reopening old Indian wounds following the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight that two separate Canadian investigations found was the work of Canadian Sikh terrorists. The mid-Atlantic bombing killed all 329 people on board.

But at the root of tensions between the United States and India are American policies in South Asia, which New Delhi sees as detrimental to its core interests. The Biden administration coddled military-backed governments Pakistan and Bangladesh (where a recent US-backed regime change was considered by many in India as a color revolution), while seeking to to spill Myanmar's military junta, including through strict sanctions and non-lethal military aid to the rebels, despite the fallout on Indian border regions.

Restoring mutual respect and trust in relations with India, which Biden has recognized is one of the largest in the world, should be a priority for the next American administration. Fortuitously, there will be a connection to India in one way or another, whether the United States elects its first Indian American president in the person of Kamala Harris or its first Indian American second lady in the person of Usha Vance , wife of Senator JD Vance (Republican of Ohio).

It is just as urgent that the next president prevent a formal Sino-Russian alliance, including by taking advantage of historic Sino-Russian distrust to pit one against the other. If Beijing and Moscow cement a military and strategic alliance against America, Washington's worst geopolitical nightmare would come true.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia's new battlefield.