The Wall Street Journal
Faced with an increasingly
assertive China, the United States is embracing India.
Like America,
India
is a democracy – an open, pluralistic society. Military planners in Washington don’t spend time fretting about war with India, the way they do about conflict with China. India’s economy, with its vibrant services
sector, doesn’t pose nearly the same the challenge to the U.S. as China’s manufacturing juggernaut.
In short, to U.S. policy-makers worried about the long-term
threat from China, India looks
like a useful counterbalance.
Not so fast, says a newly
published book by George Gilboy, a researcher at the MIT Center
for International Studies, and Eric Heginbotham, a senior political
scientist at the RAND Corporation. “Chinese
and Indian Strategic Behavior” argues that the benign view of India in
Washington policy-making circles may be an illusion, rooted more in U.S.
insecurity about China than a hard-nosed assessment of India. When you stop looking
at India through the prism
of China,
the authors argue, the picture looks very different. On many issues of key
concern to Washington, from trade and
investment to Iran and arms
proliferation, India’s view
of the view of the world is strikingly similar to China’s.
One of the book’s big takeaways:
Far from being a “balancer” to China,
the rise of India could mean
“double trouble” for Washington.
The Wall Street Journal’s China
editor Andrew Browne recently sat down with the authors. Edited excerpts below:
What motivated you to
write this book?
Gilboy: The original objective is
really to understand what rising Chinese and Indian power means for U.S. interests.
There’s an impression out there that China
is emerging as an inevitable challenger and potential enemy, and India is
emerging as a natural ally. And that ought to be investigated, in part by just
asking the same question of each power.
Heginbotham: When you just ask
‘How is China a challenger?’
and ‘How might India
help?’ you’re not likely to get the reverse of the coin on either one of those
countries. The real purpose here was to ask the same questions in a structured
way and look at the empirical data on actual behavior.
So what’s the conclusion?
Heginbotham: The punchline here
is that what we may be facing with the rise of these two powers is
double-trouble. Both are going to present challenges to the United States.
At the same time, we’ll be able to partner with both of them on various issues.
It’s a much more mixed bag – a much more nuanced picture than we think is
generally recognized.
The authors of "Chinese and
Indian Strategic Behavior" say the rise of both China
and India is not a good
thing for the U.S.
The WSJ's Deborah Kan speaks to China
Editor Andrew Browne.
Gilboy: Both China and India are equally likely to pursue
their territorial and maritime claims over disputed areas, they’re equally
likely to use force in international disputes, and they spend roughly the same
share of GDP on military power. Both of them have an outstanding territorial
and political dispute that’s wrapped up not only in territorial questions but
also questions of state legitimacy in both countries, and also of national
identity: Taiwan for China; Kashmir for India. So they’re equally difficult
to resolve. Partly as a result, both pursue a common agenda at the U.N. and
other security bodies.a strict interpretation of state sovereignty and a
protection of the principle of non-interference in the affairs of other states.
This helps us understand why India
is such a reluctant ally on questions all the way from Libya to Syria
to Iran.
India
is just as committed to this idea of not having Western military interventions
in these states.
Heginbotham: The strict
interpretation of sovereignty isn’t an academic issue – it has real
consequences. We looked at UN voting records and there’s a very high level of
convergence between Indian and China
on Iran, Sudan, Burma, WMD issues. On these issues
of importance to the U.S.,
the Chinese and Indian positions are very close.
What about the argument
that democracies make better partners?
Heginbotham: Obviously that
depends on perspective, but the realist view on international relations is that
states pursue their interests, and that’s irrespective of whether they’re
democracies. During the Cold War democratic India
often aligned with the Soviet Union while China
sometimes cooperated with the U.S.
in balancing the Soviets.
Gilboy: There is a very limited
idea out there in the international relations literature about how democracies
don’t fight wars with each other. But the problem is that some policymakers
seem to extend that “democracies don’t fight each other” claim into another
argument, which is that democracies are going to see the world in the same way
even if they are very different democracies and in very different regional and
strategic circumstances. That’s a question that ought to be asked. Is it true?
How do you compare Indian
and Chinese military doctrine?
Gilboy: They both emphasize
offense, like most modern militaries. But in China you have a single, strong
centralized institution – the Central Military Commission – that governs
military policy and imposes a great deal of strategic cohesion on Chinese
military and strategic policies. In India there is much more diversity.
There’s a very strong civilian control of the military, but the military
services themselves pursue and develop their own military doctrines and their
own modernization priorities.
Is there a risk of a
blow-up between China and India?
Heginbotham: There is an active
rivalry on the security side. It’s felt a lot more keenly in India although the sentiment is growing in China as well.
Some people think China-India tensions could benefit the U.S. by constraining China, but rivalry can also have
negative effects. In the nuclear and missile arena, we see India charging
ahead, and now both countries are talking about developing MIRVS (multiple
warheads). Both have at least some R&D on missile defense. The nuclear
issue is becoming more important to both. The world has not seen a situation
where you have multilateral nuclear dynamics and the need to address nuclear
issues on a multilateral basis. Rivalry in that realm has the potential to
severely complicate U.S.
strategic arms control efforts.
Gilboy: China is a much more powerful military power;
the Chinese economy is about four times the size of India. There is a border dispute
that is difficult to resolve. They also have some divergence of ideas over
maritime security, particularly in the Indian Ocean.
But overall both China and India want good
relations with each other and both of them, I think, are pretty clear that they
have some important agenda items in common. These include gaining more
influence in international bodies and institutions and common views on diluting
what they see as the excesses of U.S. power.
What about trade and
investment?
Gilboy: U.S. trade with China
is ten times its trade with India,
although India
trade is growing rapidly. That is an indicator of much greater mutual interest.
When we looked at the kinds of trade disputes these countries have, we found
that at the WTO, even though China’s
trade is four to five times larger than India’s trade, they face about the
same number of trade complaints at the WTO and they are on the same kind of
issues: market access, dumping cases. IPR losses in the two countries are
roughly proportional to the size of their economies. On direct investment, both
countries, if you look at surveys from the World Bank, have serious problems
with contract enforcement, for instance.They both have very serious problems
domestically with corruption. On enforcement of contracts and corruption, China is ranked slightly ahead of India. So, hang
on a second, if we face similar challenges in both countries, as the U.S. relationship with India grows in
size, perhaps the significance of those problems will grow as well. That leads
you back to the double trouble thing.
We looked at outward investment
and energy investment with rogue regimes. It turns out that in all of the
so-called rogue regimes that you can identify – Iran,
Sudan, Syria, Myanmar,
Cuba – India companies
are there with the Chinese. It’s a similar pattern of state-led investment
where state-owned companies are doing the visits, backed by state diplomacy and
ministerial visits, and backed directly or indirectly by state financing. So
there’s no real divergence there.
Courtesy:
The Wall Street Journal
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