The U.S.-India Strategic Endgame

In February 2016, Richard Verma, the U.S. ambassador to India, expressed an unusually optimistic prognosis of the bilateral between the two countries. Verma, recognizing the urgency of regional states stepping up to defend the status quo regional architecture, called on India to “move beyond its historical reservations to seize this moment, to reassert its leadership role in the region.” The ambassador's comments weren't an aberration.

Not long after, in March 2016, Admiral Harry B. Harris of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), speaking at a track-two dialogue, echoed Verma's remarks, noting that he hoped "in the not too distant future, American and Indian Navy vessels steaming together will become a common and welcome sight throughout Indo-Asia-Pacific waters, as we work together to maintain freedom of the seas for all nations."

Officials in India hastily pointed out that despite Verma and Harris' aspirations for the U.S.-India bilateral, New Delhi was not ready to revolutionize its relationship with Washington. Manohar Parrikar, India's defense minister, said that there would be no change to India's long-standing policy of only participating in overseas military missions under a United Nations flag.

The background to this relationship is complex. The United States has emerged as India's top defense supplier in recent years, dethroning Russia. Moreover, India's Navy conducts more exercises with the U.S. Navy than with any other. Finally, under the U.S.-India Defense Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI), India is seeking access to U.S. military technology and platforms--a development in the bilateral that would have seemed a fantasy even a decade ago.

While the trend-line in U.S.-India defense cooperation decisively slopes upwards, indicating a steady convergence, differences persist between the two sides, primarily borne of New Delhi's strategic predilections and a lack of consensus within India about Washington's trustworthiness as a partner. With New Delhi’s historical tendency to value its strategic autonomy and eschew alliances, the U.S.-India defense relationship has had its limits. Moreover, India's difficult relationship with Pakistan, a close U.S. strategic partner, has left New Delhi skeptical about Washington's intentions.

Against this complex backdrop, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter arrived in India in April for a major bilateral visit--likely his last as U.S. President Barack Obama's secretary of defense. Carter, like Verma and Harris, is an optimist about the possibilities in the U.S.-India relationship. Moreover, his affinity toward India isn't something he discovered when he took over the defense portfolio from his predecessor, Chuck Hagel.

In 2006, shortly after the United States and India announced a “strategic partnership” following the watershed conclusion of a framework civil nuclear agreement, Carter wrote optimistically about India in a Foreign Affairs article. Later, as deputy secretary of defense in the Obama administration, he spearheaded the DTTI initiative, now a major cornerstone of the relationship. Just last winter, Carter and Parrikar updated the U.S.-India defense framework – a bilateral document that set out the course and scope of U.S.-India defense collaboration for a decade, replacing a similar 2005 document.

Carter's time in New Delhi was eagerly covered by the Indian press, but the deliverables were largely unremarkable and evidence of continuing gradualism along the positive trend-line of increasing defense cooperation between the two countries. Symbolically, the visit had a notable first: Carter boarded the INS Vikramaditya, one of the Indian Navy's two active aircraft carriers. A joint statement issued at the conclusion of Carter's time in India saw both sides voice support for the principles underlying the status quo of a rules-based regional order, including the freedom of navigation and overflight.

Under the DTTI, New Delhi and Washington have started examining the possibility of India gaining access to sensitive U.S. carrier technology, including electromagnetic catapult launch systems and nuclear propulsion technology. The Carter-Parrikar joint statement also mentioned two relatively mundane new pathfinder projects under the DTTI: one on "digital helmet mounted displays" and a "joint biological tactical detection system." Carter and Parrikar additionally discussed interest expressed by U.S. defense firms Boeing and Lockheed Martin in selling their fighter jets to India with local co-production, a must-have requirement for New Delhi.

Critically, the two sides managed to reach an understanding, after more than a decade of negotiations, on a final draft of a logistics exchange agreement. The agreement will allow the United States and India to facilitate military logistics sharing at an at-will basis. The agreement essentially acts as a foundational bureaucratic framework for allowing the militaries of the two countries to formalize activity that already occurs on an ad hoc basis. Originally proposed in 2002 by the United States as a Logistics Support Agreement (LSA), the contours of the agreement have inspired considerable debate in India. Critics see the agreement as an effort to deprive India of its cherished strategic autonomy and formalize a wholesale pivot toward Washington.

Though Carter and Parrikar didn't directly address the logistics agreement in great detail, they altogether omitted any mention of two similar foundational agreements that are still pending. One agreement, on integrating communication and intelligence, would allow India to access proprietary U.S. encrypted communication systems; India may, for example, receive access to U.S. P-8I Poseidon intelligence on hostile sub-surface vessels in the Indian Ocean. The second agreement would allow the two countries to share targeting and navigational data.

Despite the recent effusiveness about the state of the relationship by U.S. and Indian officials, it isn't clear that the fundamentals of the relationship have transformed to the extent that the sorts of activities Verma and Harris envision could become a reality anytime soon. Still, a lack of revolutionary change in the bilateral shouldn't be a cause for pessimism about the trajectory of U.S.-India ties. After all, it is a testament to the convergence between the two states that India's center-right government feels confident moving forward with a foundational logistics agreement, which had been unattainable for years given domestic political constraints in India.

Moreover, there are other signs that New Delhi and Washington will continue their convergence. For instance, zooming out from the modest deliverables that emerged from Carter's visit to India, the overall trajectory of U.S. engagement with India is well synchronized with Washington's broader approach to networking its Asia-Pacific partnerships and alliances. Where a hub-and-spoke system of alliance and partnership management once dominated the U.S. approach to the region, a bevy of trilaterals is now emerging along multiple axes, incorporating states as diverse as India, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and South Korea.

Meanwhile, India remains uneasy about external geopolitical developments in the Indian Ocean Region and the Asia-Pacific more broadly. Many of these developments stem from China's economic outreach and strategic initiative. The former is apparent in India's immediate neighborhood, where states ranging from Pakistan to the Maldives grow closer to Beijing at New Delhi's cost. The latter, meanwhile, exhibits itself in the South China Sea, which is increasingly important for India.

What's particularly reassuring is that both New Delhi and Washington appreciate these external factors, which no doubt play an important role in their ongoing convergence. For instance, before leaving for India, Carter told an audience in New York City that "there’s no difficulty in principle either with the idea, in our minds, that India is an enduring partner, or ... their willingness to work with us, although in a way that retains their independence, which is important."

India's autonomy and independence are closely held, but if New Delhi senses that its interests will be best served in the long-term by hewing closer to the United States, it may start to move beyond the constraints that have limited and delayed the convergence between these two democracies. Ultimately, as defense collaboration continues to increase incrementally year over year, the two sides will need to continue to develop mutual trust. Only then can sort of U.S.-India security relationship envisaged by Verma and Harris become a reality.