Partners over the China Challenge
As new security partnerships are being used in Asia to supplement existing alliances, it is interesting to consider how nations choose to co-operate when facing common strategic challenges. Tanvi Madan, director of the Indian Project at Brookings, provides a revealing, innovative study of the relationship between India and the US, filtered through the lens of the strategic and ideological challenge posed by China in the Cold War. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, she charts four stages in the evolution of ties between 1949 and 1979: “divergence, convergence, dependence and disengagement.”
Madan helpfully removes India from the South Asian sub-regional box and the preoccupation with Pakistan to show that, despite the country’s formal non-aligned status, Indian leaders worked with their US counterparts to partner strategically in offsetting the China challenge. Madan’s analysis highlights India’s importance to the US, as economic counterweight to Beijing’s developmental model or as potential strategic partner at the time of the 1962 Sino-india border war.
Without minimizing the periodic divergence of views on the China challenge (especially after Nixon’s 1971 rapprochement), Madan reveals the structural factors underpinning this partnership and how China loomed far larger in US and Indian officials’ thinking than has been acknowledged in existing scholarship.
A revealing, innovative study of the relationship between India and the US.