There are clearly a number of factors involved, but it is no accident that her announcement was made on the eve of President Obama’s visit to Australia, who came to announce a new US engagement in Asia and an enhanced role for Australia.
The new US strategic thrust is mainly about the rise of China and relative decline of the US. With bin Laden dead and after years of US ‘boots on the ground’ in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Washington has concluded that its wars are providing security for others, such as China, to ‘free ride’, while America pays a price it can ill afford, both financially and politically. All this saps America’s capacity to play in the real game, which has now shifted to Asia.
So where does India fit in?
The CIA has assessed that India is a ‘swing state’ in Asia. As a rapidly rising power with a vast population weighted to youth, India has the long-term potential to be as important an Asian power as China. How India chooses to lock in to Asia’s security architecture will be crucial to how that architecture is likely to evolve.
Military exercises and exchanges between India and the US have gathered pace and developed in sophistication since 1991. President Bush’s 2005 decision to bring India into the nuclear ‘tent’ was very much part of this developing strategic relationship. Following this nuclear agreement, the US signed a number of important ‘end user’ agreements with India, enabling the transfer of sophisticated military technologies. It has even held out the prospect that India might become involved in the production of the F-35 joint strike fighter.
Washington’s unstated intent is to put China off its stride by developing a relationship with another emerging — and democratic — power. It thereby hopes to ‘manage’ China’s rise from a position of strength.
But viewed from India, a strategic relationship with the US is by no means a done deal. In fact, there are two views in New Delhi: one, centred on the Ministry of External Affairs, argues that India should stand equidistant between China and the US; while the other, seemingly centred on elements within the National Security Council and defence establishment, argues that the only way to deal with China is to stand up to it.
At the moment, India is using its relationship with the US to acquire technology and ‘hedge’ in light of its uncertain relationship with China. And should its interactions with China deteriorate, the US relationship would eventually be ‘called in’. That is not to say India would become an ‘ally’ of the US in the formal sense, but that the strategic quality of the relationship would deepen.
The debate in Australia on how to handle the rise of China roughly parallels the one being conducted in India. Some argue the US should make strategic space for China’s rise in the hope of a ‘concert of powers’ emerging in Asia, of which India would be a member. Those of a more realist bent argue that China should be dealt with from a position of strength.
Washington’s current reassertion of its offshore balancing role in Asia is dependent on a series of bilateral relationships, including with Australia, Japan, India and South Korea. Any attempt to shift this ‘hub and spokes’ model to a multilateral balance is fraught with difficulty, in that Beijing would quickly perceive it as an attempt to ‘contain’ China, just as occurred in 2007 with the abortive ‘quadrilateral’ proposal.
The US is therefore essentially engaged in a process of seeking bilaterally to strengthen its relationships, while at the same time indirectly using this process to achieve greater ‘lateral’ connection between the various ‘spokes’, but short of any formal arrangement. The aim is to make it clear to China that if it does not play by the rules, it could quickly find itself arraigned against a powerful multilateral balance of the ‘like-minded’.
Australia–India relations and the sale of uranium are important at many levels and Washington’s China strategy is only one of them. But firming friendship between India and Australia and a deepening economic relationship reflecting Australia’s commodity supply role would effectively help tie India in with a regional ‘incipient balance’ of the like-minded and mitigate Australia’s dilemma — caught as it currently is between Washington and Beijing.
Sandy Gordon is a Visiting Fellow at RegNet, College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University.
This article first appeared on the South Asia Masala website
The uranium deal with India, will allow Australia to move forward in any future strategic partnership it may seek with India. Without it, the relationship would have been stuck with just coal, cricket and students.
From a New Delhi perspective the story was – if Australia was unwilling to sell India raw uranium, while selling the yellow cake to its Northern neighbour who despite having signed the NPT was linked to nuclearisation of Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and Myanmar, it meant a) Australia was over-awed by China and b) India should not trust it as a potential strategic partner.
One would guess, Obama simply passed this message on before visiting Down Under and then leaned somewhat.
Why should Australia and India seek to have any security partnership at all? – China is of course there at the back of everyone’s mind, but more than that its the security of sealanes through the increasingly vital Indian Ocean through which both the countries route their trade. If they can’t join hands to guard their backyards, then when things start falling apart they won’t be able to cooperate for any bigger schemes.