India urges US to refresh ties in world of frenemies
WASHINGTON: India and the US will need to “refresh” ties as the old globalised world order built after 1945 gives way to an emerging arrangement marked by a “proliferation of frenemies”, friends who differ and competitors who cooperate, external affairs minister S Jaishankar has said.
The emerging order will be “multipolar” and “intensely competitive and driven by the balance of power”, instead of one based on “shared endeavours” and “collective security”, he said. Competing powers will work together based on “convergence” of interests, not “congruence”, he added.
The new era, Jaishankar said, “calls for both India and the US to press the refresh button of their relationship as the really important relationships in the world are the less transactional ones. They are driven by global assessments and are based on strengthening each other”.
He did not explain what about India-US ties had prompted his call for hitting the refresh button but expressed confidence in the current state of the relationship.
“Recent events in our ties confirm that the deep convergences developed over the last two decades are now in full play. I am confident that a strategic appreciation of the emerging global landscape would only bring us closer,” said Jaishankar, who is on a three-day visit to the US.
India’s relations with the US have been more transactional on President Donald Trump’s watch than in the past, as is true for Washington’s ties with other nations. India and the US are negotiating a trade deal to end current and outstanding issues going back decades. They have also sought to manage competing interests regarding India’s traditional ties with Russia and Iran, one an arch-rival and the other a sworn enemy of the US.
Jaishankar, regarded as a strategic thinker and well-known in US academia and policy circles, was speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a leading think-tank.
He has had a series of thinktank events at which he spoke expansively on all aspects of international relations with India in the middle — the US, Europe, China, the Gulf and the neighbourhood.
Jaishankar said the postWorld War 2 global order stands eroded because of “disenchantment with globalisation, anger at mercantilism and an inability to accept changes”.
One of the key dimensions of the emerging world will be its multi-polarity, where “an India or a Brazil will demand a greater voice with a growing economy”. The other key dimensions of this order, driven by nationalistic and more transactional power centres that prefer a balance of power to collective security, will be the “proliferation of frenemies”, “allies who publicly turn on each other, or competitors who are compelled to make common cause on issues”.
India’s trilateral meetings with the US and Japan on one hand, and with Russia and China on the other, on the margins of the G-20 Summit in recent years, should be seen in this context of a changing world of countries brought together by convergence, Jaishankar said.
India finds it “perfectly natural” to engage a Chinese leader at Wuhan, the Russian one at Sochi and then go on to do the “2+2” meeting of foreign and defence ministers of the two sides.
New Delhi’s decisions regarding Kashmir must be considered against the backdrop of this emerging order, for which a different mindset is required, one in which issues “presumed to be intractable challenges will have to be addressed, not ducked”, he said.
“I don’t recall a foreign minister — or any foreign official for that matter — working the town so comprehensively and effectively as @DrSJaishankar has this week. Nobody in DC should be left uncertain about India’s worldview and policy priorities,” said Peter Lavoy, a government relations advisor at ExxonMobil, in a tweet on Wednesday.