Is India one of the major “poles” in a multipolar geopolitical environment?

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At the beginning of the 19th century, the British Empire looked as if it would come undone.?Revolutionaries kicked the British out of what would become the United States and so deprived the throne of its most valuable colonies in the New World. Failed attempts to maintain the empire caused British debt to skyrocket, reaching nearly 200 percent of gross domestic product by 1800. Just across the English Channel, a more populous and wealthier French challenger appeared primed for Eurasian domination, blessed as it was by Napoleon’s military prowess. Meanwhile, the Qing Dynasty was reaping the benefits of one of the most politically stable periods in Chinese history. By 1820, the Middle Kingdom’s economy accounted for 33 percent of global GDP; the British Empire’s accounted for a mere 5.2 percent.

History proved these indicators wrong.?We now know that Britain was soon to build an empire whose reach and power would dwarf even that of the Romans. There were several reasons for this reversal of fate, but the most important was well-known to British politicians themselves at the time. In the words of Lord Curzon in 1901,?“As long as we rule India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power.”?Britain withstood Napoleon, the loss of the American colonies, the Qing Dynasty, and its surging debt because it conquered Mughal India, an almost century-long process that culminated in a two-year war and the application of direct rule of the British Raj in 1858. In many ways, India gave Britain a sustained period of global hegemony.

Today, the United States believes India will do the same for it. The U.S. doesn’t intend to conquer India by force, of course. The India of today is not the technologically backward or politically frayed India the British Empire subjugated over two centuries ago, so it’s not even clear that the U.S. could. Instead,?Washington wants to coax India to abandon its history of non-alignment in foreign policy and throw in its lot with a U.S.-led future. So far, U.S. attempts to accomplish this goal have met with mixed success.?On the one hand, India has joined the Quad, the poorly named budding Indo-Pacific alliance bringing together the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India. On the other hand, despite a bromance between Narendra Modi and Donald Trump, and plenty of interest from the Biden White House, a U.S.-India trade deal has not been forthcoming.

When the British took control of India, they forced India to enact measures that were good for the British economy but highly destructive to India’s economy. India is not about to go down a similar road with the United States. It doesn’t want to become a captive market for the U.S. any more than it wants to offer up its resources as a growth engine for a U.S. government that is attempting to jumpstart the moribund American manufacturing sector.?If the U.S. wants to entice India to offer Washington meaningful trade concessions, the U.S. will have to provide India with what it most needs: investment.?The U.S., however, is also warier of supporting a potential ally like India than ever before. The U.S. aided China’s economic rise via globalization – Biden’s new industrial policy is not designed to reshore U.S. manufacturing to India, but to nearshore and even reshore it home.

Since 2019, my overall assessment of India was that it was not interested in being aligned with the U.S.?India spent the Cold War balancing between the United States and the Soviet Union – and there is no reason for India to change its grand strategy for a pat on the back from Washington. India and China have their squabbles and even some land disputes, but both also have relatively defined spheres of influence. India does not want to contain China – it wants to coexist with China. India’s most pressing foreign competition is not with China, but with Pakistan – a rivalry enabled in no small part by decades of American support, a fact India has certainly not forgotten.

Developments this week have not changed my mind – but they do offer a challenge to that assessment.?The Modi government’s budget showed a country less interested in military spending and more interested in infrastructure. This is an area where the U.S. can help. More stark however was the inaugural meeting of the U.S.-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET), formed in May 2022. The two sides discussed opportunities for greater cooperation in critical and emerging technologies, co-development and coproduction, and ways to deepen connectivity across innovation ecosystems. They also identified the fields of biotechnology, advanced materials, and rare earth processing technology as areas for future cooperation. Indeed, according to the White House readout, there are an impressive number of programs and initiatives underway via the auspices of iCET.

Let’s see how many of those initiatives see progress before the next iCET meeting in New Delhi later this year before we get too excited about the prospect of deeper U.S.-India ties. I am not ready to throw out my assessment of India’s desire for non-aligned foreign policy with the bathwater. After all, it is in India’s interest to play up the potential threat China poses and its own relatively minor contributions so far in containing it. But where before I felt certain that India had more in common with China than meets the eye,?there is a creeping doubt in my mind – that India?does?view Chinas a challenger, and that, perhaps, India cannot achieve its ambitious goals if it does not have a partnership with the U.S.

If that turns out to be the case, it is a blow to the multipolar thesis – India figures to be one of the major “poles” in a multipolar geopolitical environment. It could also give U.S. hegemony a new lease on life.?In 2019, whilst still at?Geopolitical Futures, I wrote the following: “India’s fate is in its own hands. The extent to which India will be willing to do the U.S.’ bidding will be commensurate with how useful the U.S. can make itself in helping India achieve its interests. Gunboats and tariffs are no more use here.” On paper, India has everything it needs to be a major power in the decades ahead, but India is also an unwieldy place that has punched below its weight for centuries because of its size and lack of coherence. I’m not willing to abandon my macro thesis – that India will resist aligning with any one bloc or country and will instead build its own sphere of influence – but I am slightly less certain than I was going into the week, and that is worth noting.?