Modi visit shows need for ties to be maintained

WASHINGTON — President Biden has declared “the battle between democracy and autocracy” to be the defining struggle of his time. But when he rolls out the red carpet on the South Lawn of the White House for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India on Thursday morning, Biden will effectively call a temporary truce.

In granting Modi a coveted state visit, complete with a star-studded gala dinner, Biden will shower attention on a leader presiding over democratic backsliding in the world’s most populous nation. Modi’s government has cracked down on dissent and hounded opponents in a way that has raised fears of an authoritarian turn not seen since India’s slip into dictatorship in the 1970s.

Yet Biden has concluded, much as his predecessors did, that he needs India despite concerns over human rights just as he believes he needs Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and other countries that are either outright autocracies or do not fit into the category of ideal democracies. At a time of confrontation with Russia and an uneasy standoff with China, Biden is being forced to accept the flaws of America’s friends.

Two and a half years into his administration, the democracy-versus-autocracy framework has, therefore, become something of a geopolitical straitjacket for Biden, one that allows for little of the subtleties his foreign policy actually envisions yet that virtually guarantees criticism every time he shakes hands with a counterpart who does not pass the George Washington test. Even some of his top advisers privately view the construct as too black-andwhite in a world of grays.

“Any time a president dresses up his foreign policy in the language of values, any concession to geopolitical reality inevitably elicits cries of hypocrisy,” said Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “The reality, of course, is that every US president — including the ones most devoted to democracy and human rights — realized that there were some relationships that were just too strategically important to hold hostage to concerns about democratic values.”

The dynamic, which has played out repeatedly, has become a wearying topic for some top administration officials. The democracy slogan, they said, never fully captured a more textured strategy that goes well beyond dividing the world into two simple and opposing camps. It was more about recognizing the growing global drift away from freedom and the threats posed by more aggressive powers like Russia and China.

“From our perspective, it has never been as simple as drawing up jerseys,” Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said in an interview with several reporters Tuesday. “It has always been about seeing those long-term trends and trying to point those trends in the right direction and then being prepared to have a more sophisticated approach to how we build relationships with a range of different countries.”

The White House sees the Modi visit as a critical moment to cement a relationship with one of the leading “swing states,” as officials have come to describe powers that have not definitively taken sides in Russia’s war against Ukraine. And US officials see India as one of the bulwarks against an advancing China.

“We expect this will be a historic visit,” Sullivan said, predicting “a significant number of announcements” of agreements on military sales, technology, supply chains, semiconductors and energy, among others. “This really, from my perspective, will be one of the defining partnerships of our age.”

Sullivan insisted that Biden was not betraying his commitment to democracy by hosting Modi so lavishly and said the president would raise democracy and human rights concerns, albeit diplomatically. Biden, Sullivan said, will “try to indicate where we stand without coming across as somehow talking down to or lecturing another country that has a proud history of sovereignty.”