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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar hold a news conference in Washington, DC.
US warns India on dealing with Russia: “Pakistan is Plan B”
After years of favoring New Delhi, the US is now back to balancing between India and Pakistan.
The decade-long deterioration of ties with Islamabad, propelled by Pakistan’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and tilt toward China, had shaped Washington’s conventional thinking into a neat binary: that a democratic, anti-China India is ‘in’ and an autocratic, pro-China Pakistan is ‘out’ of the American camp.
That’s no longer the case in America’s response to India’s consistent hedging and betting on Russia, as well as Pakistan’s diplomatic overtures and counterterrorism cooperation. Indeed, the future of US positioning in South Asia seems to be shifting, as Washington resumes playing ball with both nuclear-armed rivals like it’s done for decades.
America’s pal, but Russia’s BFF. On Saturday, India abstained from voting for a US-sponsored UN Security Council resolution slamming Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory. This wasn’t the first time the Indians have refused to back the Americans — every UN resolution tabled against Russian aggression in Ukraine since the beginning of the war has seen India walk away from the crime scene.
For India watchers who acknowledge New Delhi’s stated policy of strategic autonomy — basically a we-will-do-the-right-thing-but-in-our-own-way approach to a values-based order — the latest abstention was a disappointment, coming just days after PM Narendra Modi was praised by Washington for lecturing Vladimir Putin about this not being “an era of war.”
Although Indian diplomats insist that dialogue is the only answer to settling disputes, Modi’s government is now being criticized even at home for speaking from both sides of its mouth, especially as the war takes on a nuclear dimension.
The frustration is premised on a contradiction. Though it is still counted as a strategic partner of the US and an important teammate on the Quad, India’s decades-long defense ties with Moscow continue to thrive.
The Indians are shoring up the Russian economy by buying more fossil fuels (albeit at steep discounts). This year, oil imports are up thirty-fold from 2021, and coal purchases have quadrupled. Meanwhile, the Indians remain Moscow’s biggest arms customer and continue buying sophisticated Russian weapons despite the risk of triggering US sanctions.
This attitude of sacrifice-rules-for-money by India shows that “since Russia invaded Ukraine, Modi and his government have become ultra-realist on foreign policy,” says Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation.
The Indians, he explains, “have refused to condemn Russian aggression and its undermining of the rules-based international order, which New Delhi claims to uphold along with like-minded democratic states,” he said. Rather, India has prioritized discounted Russian oil — a business over values approach — which doesn't say much about India’s commitment to the rules-based system that it claims to support.
Pakistan as Plan B? But Washington isn’t just sitting pretty watching India play both sides. Responding to New Delhi’s hedging through its own, the US is gearing up to balance the military relationship with Islamabad.
After suspending all military aid in 2018 due to Pakistan’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, the US State Department reversed course last month, resuming critical military assistance to Islamabad. India, of course, is up in arms. After all, the F-16 fighter-bomber — which the Americans are servicing for the Pakistanis — was used to shoot down at least one Indian Air Force MiG-21 in 2019.
While the State Department has pushed back against India’s protests by saying it values its relations with both sides, Pakistan seems to have been let out of Washington’s doghouse. Last week, State fêted Pakistan’s foreign minister for a week-long sojourn, topped with a ceremony commemorating 75 years of diplomatic ties at the Museum of American Diplomacy. (His Indian counterpart — who was in town around the same time complaining about the Pakistani weapons deal — was also given the royal treatment, with a dinner at Blinken’s home.)
As far as the Pakistanis are concerned, the boys are back in town. This week, the Pentagon is hosting Pakistan’s all-powerful army chief, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, who played a crucial role in the ousting of former prime minister Imran Khan, an anti-American populist. On Gen. Bajwa’s agenda: Pakistani support for Washington’s over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, as well as grappling with the Taliban, ISIS-K and al-Qaida.
“The US seems to be finally recognizing that despite the full-throated pronouncements from New Delhi about a rules-based international order, India’s need for cheap Russian oil and Russian weapons override everything else,” says Uzair Younis, director of the Pakistan Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
Given this context, he adds, Washington is finally realizing that it must also pursue “a parallel diplomatic path with Pakistan, especially given that New Delhi is unlikely to be weaned off its addiction to Russian energy and weapons any time soon.”
However, India will remain important for America. Surely, this maneuvering hasn’t ruptured the proximity between Washington and New Delhi – China remains their common rival, after all — but it is being seen as a tactical response to India’s dealing with the Russians.
Plus, after years of increasing dependency on China, the Pakistanis are only too eager to balance their interests with Washington, but only till the Chinese come back to them with a better offer for their rentier state.
Also, the resumption of US military aid to Pakistan — still paltry compared to America’s broad defense, economic, and tech ties with India — has not disturbed India’s standing as a “strategic partner." Though we are not back to hyphenating India with Pakistan — a Cold War-era Washingtonian trait that irritated New Delhi for decades — recent moves by the US have clearly irked the Indians. But are they going to reset US priorities in South Asia?
“One of the enduring challenges for the US-India relationship is that each country insists on maintaining cordial ties with the other’s key rival,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center.
This problem appeared to be working itself out in recent years, as India reduced its share of Russian arms imports and the US cut off security aid to Pakistan. But now we are seeing a return to what Kugelman calls the “old normal” — India reasserting its friendship with Russia and the US restarting security ties with Pakistan.
“At the end of the day, neither New Delhi nor Washington are willing to let go of these longstanding relationships,” he explains.
Still, what the Americans are doing to the Indians — a diplomatic tit-for-tat, really — makes the long-term trajectory of India-Russia and US-Pakistan relations more unsettled than that of US-India relations.
For Kugmelman, “they’re still realities in the here and now. It’s little more than a nuisance for US-India relations, but a nuisance nonetheless.”
Bottom line: The Pakistanis might be back in play in Washington, but India’s not getting on any American blacklist anytime soon. Regardless, the US has put on its Great Power suit, and sent New Delhi a bill about the cost of doing business with the Russians.This article comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
COVID explodes in India
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Welcome to your week. Quick Take for you. Thought I would talk today about India.
The epicenter today and for the foreseeable future of the coronavirus pandemic. We are seeing 350,000 cases a day and over 2,000 deaths. Those are surely massive undercounts for an incredibly poor and half rural population that has nowhere near the infrastructure or political will to engage in the data collection that you would need to get those numbers out. The presumption is the real numbers are five to 10 times that. The government is hoping that these cases and deaths will peak in mid-May, about a month away. This is, I mean in terms of the total path of the pandemic, this is by far the largest outbreak that we've seen since this started over a year ago.
Narendra Modi is taking it pretty hard politically in India, in part because back in January, when he was speaking at the World Economic Forum meeting, virtually, he basically declared victory over coronavirus, that India was one of the countries that had successfully controlled coronavirus. Obviously, seriously premature in that announcement. Lots of domestic blowback, lots of people calling for his resignation on social media, and the rest. Modi supporting mass campaign rallies. He was certainly wearing a mask all the way through, has certainly been very supportive of vaccines. But the inability and unwillingness of the Indian government to get ahead of this in terms of more quarantines and lockdowns, the economic cost would be massive for India. And allowing for these massive gatherings of humans, not just around election rallies, but specifically the Kumbh Mela, where you've got all of these, it's a religious ritual with 3 million people gathering, bathing in the Ganges River, massive super spreader events greater than anything we've seen in the world. And you know, that's clearly an indictment on his leadership.
Now, I want to be clear, I would not give Modi the same negative marks that I would for people like Bolsonaro in Brazil, or AMLO in Mexico, or Trump in the United States, because he hasn't been a denier of the vaccine, he hasn't been promoting false cures, hasn't been saying don't wear masks, he hasn't politicized the virus domestically the way that some of those other leaders have. People like the former President Magufuli in Tanzania, who died of COVID, still not admitted as such by their government. And also, the fact that India is incredibly poor, it's incredibly densely populated in urban centers. They have nowhere near the healthcare or testing infrastructure, never mind the United States, but even of a Brazil or a Mexico. And India was until very recently exporting vaccines around the world. They were part of the solution, not part of the problem. So I don't think that we should paint the same brush against Modi, that we are some of the world's leaders that have truly fallen down on this crisis. But still the size of India, the impact of all of these millions and millions of Indians that are coming down with COVID is going to lead to a lot more variants of coronavirus around the world, which requires more booster variants and very difficult for the companies to know how many they should make of which and apply them to which regions, and that will make the vaccines in turn, somewhat less effective. So it is a big problem.
And the United States, the most powerful economy, country in the world, needs to recognize that we have to do more. We've known that it was going badly in India for at least a month now. And the Indian government and the leaders of their vaccine institutes have been requesting, increasingly, alarmingly, support from the United States. Remember, India as a part of The Quad, they're supposed to be coordinating with us around vaccine export back when that was the thing, and in terms of not accepting, aligning with the Chinese in terms of help and support. The Indian government has leaned into that and now they are blaming the United States for not doing much, not exporting vaccines, not even having export of vaccine ingredients. There were export controls on all of those ingredients. And anyone that you talk to in this field would say that the US could have moved on this easily a month ago and it would have made a big difference on the ground to India.
Now, I am happy to say that over the last 48 hours, the US government, the National Security Council has announced that they are going to start providing those ingredients, medical professionals, and other assistance for the Indian government as quickly as possible. That is certainly welcome. But is it enough? It is certainly late and that is a problem. I think the United States needs to understand that coronavirus is not just a global disease, but we need a global immune system. And the focus, the extraordinary focus on the United States, as politically essential as that is, is not the appropriate epidemiological response. It's like saying, "Okay, well, we know that we've got a problem in the lungs and so we're going to treat the lungs and the lungs are great, but there's also a problem in the liver, there's a problem in the heart." And we have been completely ignoring that. But we're all one body. And indeed, humanity on the planet with the pandemic is all one body. And this is going to come back and affect us in the United States. There's no question.
So we need to take a more global view on this pandemic. The numbers that are coming out of India, and again, nowhere close to what the real numbers in India surely are right now. Hopefully we'll start to truly focus the mind on this issue in Washington, something that I am sure I will be talking a lot more about in coming weeks and months.
So that's a Quick Take from me today. I hope everyone is safe. In the United States, increasingly, don't have to avoid as many people, but in India you surely do. Talk soon.