Episode 18: Modi’s Trip to Washington

Shivshankar Menon on How India Sees the World

This week, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi traveled to the United States in his first official state visit as prime minister. Once denied entry into the United States for inciting communal violence in the Indian state of Gujarat, Modi is now being given one of the highest honors for foreign dignitaries by addressing a joint session of Congress. Modi’s trip to Washington intends to celebrate, as well as strengthen, the already strong partnership between the United States and the world’s largest democracy. And this is all despite Modi’s controversial human rights track record as well as India’s reluctance to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with targeted sanctions.

What makes the US-India partnership so important to America’s interests that the Biden administration is willing to overlook such contradictions? EGF’s senior researcher and producer, Caroline Gray, sits down with someone who knows India’s strategic thinking best: former national security advisor to India’s prime minister and foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon. Shivshankar argues there is far too much to be gained for both India and the United States for differences – domestic or international – to stand in the way.

Shivshankar Menon is a visiting professor of international relations at Ashoka University. He has served in many roles in India’s government, including as national security advisor to the prime minister, foreign secretary, and ambassador to Israel, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and China. His latest book is India and Asian Geopolitics; The Past, Present.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

SHIVSHANKAR MENON: It's not just for immediate short-term geopolitical tactical reasons. For India, the US is an essential partner if we are to transform India into a modern, prosperous, secure, developed country.

CAROLINE GRAY: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Caroline Gray, and I'm stepping in for Mark Hannah today. This week, Congress has a very special guest.

Interlude featuring archival audio

GRAY: India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is making his first official state visit to Washington, DC, will tomorrow address a joint session of Congress intended to celebrate, as well as strengthen, US-India ties.

MENON: I think Prime Minister Modi's visit this time is particularly significant. It comes at a time when the international system—the international order itself—is in flux and where congruence between India and the US is much closer than it's ever been before.

GRAY: That's Shivshankar Menon. Shivshankar has served in the highest roles in India's government when it comes to foreign affairs. He's been national security advisor to the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, and Indian ambassador to Israel, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and China.

MENON: There's a whole range of issues on which India and the US are working together as partners. The US is India's biggest trading partner. We've recently seen the increasing congruence in the way they look at the Indo-Pacific, which has become more and more important. Secretary Austin was just in India, and we've been talking about increasing cooperation in defense and co-production, research. But beyond that, on energy, for instance, both sides have worked very hard to actually try and make the transition to new and renewable energy sources. For India, actually, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US is good news. I know all the attention is on the US, Europe, and what it means for US-China, but for countries like India, if the Act does what it says, which is to lower the price of renewable energy and make the transition easier, frankly, that's welcome.

But if there isn't actually an area of human endeavor which I think the Prime Minister's visit could not cover and could not help in pushing the relationship forward. For India, the US is an essential partner. And it's not just for immediate, short-term geopolitical tactical reasons. Many people think it's because of the rise of China. But that's not it. For India, the US is an essential partner if we are to transform India into a modern, prosperous, secure, developed country. If you look at it, it makes sense. This is quite apart from whatever values we share, the commitment to democracy, and too, as I said, the geopolitical and geostrategic congruence that we have, and the economic complementarity that exists between two economies which are very different levels of development. So, if you add all that up, this is a natural partnership.

GRAY: There's major confluence, as Shivshankar notes, but there are some places where those attitudes don't necessarily align. India famously has been reluctant to criticize or condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

MENON: But I think it has made it clear that (A) it doesn't think that war or the invasion was the answer. (B) It feels that Ukrainian sovereignty, territorial integrity, should be respected. Prime Minister Modi told Mr. Putin in public that this is not the way forward. But neither do we think—and I think most Indians would agree with this—that sanctions are going to solve this problem. There's often an argument made that this is about democracy versus autocracy, or that this is a matter, somehow, of principle. We've made it quite clear that we do think sovereignty should not be violated like this. But there is a problem, I think, in suddenly deciding to apply standard sanctions and so on without any clear prospect of coming to a good outcome, because ultimately, what do we want here? We want an outcome which works for the people of Ukraine, which guarantees a European security order in which the country is not only of Central Europe and Russia, but also NATO as a whole can feel secure, as would Russia. And that, I'm afraid, is getting harder and harder to see.

GRAY: India and the United States have many shared interests. But India also has its own geopolitical concerns which make its dealings with great powers like Russia slightly different.

MENON: At core, India is both a maritime and a continental power, unlike the other members of the Quad, who, in effect, in geopolitical terms, are islands. And the US is behind two of the largest oceans on earth. Japan is. Australia is, too, an island. We have a continental issue. We have the world's largest border dispute with China. And we have worked in the past with Russia because we are a Eurasian power as well, and what happens on the continent affects us directly. So, we have both continental and maritime security interests. During the Cold War, we developed a very close defense relationship with Russia because we lacked alternatives.

GRAY: To be sure, that relationship has declined. Russia used to account for 80 percent of India's defense imports until around 2005. Now it's less than 30 percent The United States actually provides more defense equipment to India than Russia does now.

MENON: But of course, there's legacy platforms, which is why this continues. The Ukraine war and Russia is increasing dependence on China, and alignment with China probably means the Indian defense link is with Russia will probably get even more attenuated over time. But that still doesn't change the nature of the geopolitics of Eurasia. And unless we're willing to just write off continental Asia and hand it over to newer species, I think we will continue to work with the powers on Asia. And which are those powers? With China, we have a very difficult relationship. We had boundary clashes––the first deaths on the border in over 40 years in 2020––and our political relationship is very fraught. So, who we left to work with? We work with Russia. We work with Turkey. We work with Iran. We work with whoever there is to the extent that we can. And I think we will continue to do that.

GRAY: And the war in Ukraine, of course, isn't the only topic many are concerned about when it comes to Modi's visit this week. It's also the prime minister's track record on human rights. While tomorrow's visit is being framed as a meeting between the world's two great democracies, the treatment and persecution of India's large Muslim minority has only gotten worse under Modi's leadership. But for Shivshankar, this shouldn't necessarily preclude cooperation between the two countries.

MENON: One thing we share—India and the US—is that we're both democracies, but in both countries, democracy is a work in progress, has been for a long time and will probably remain so. And that's part of being democratic, that we keep improving what we have, and we keep working at it, and that we argue about it internally among ourselves. I used to tell my Chinese friends, for instance, “We do it in public what you do in private. But don't ever misunderstand that for the weakness of the system.” But it also means we respect differing opinions. We don't interfere in your decisions about how you run your democracy, and you don't interfere in ours. And for me, that's a good basis, that if we dealt with these issues, the issues you mentioned—allegations of human rights violations, of perfecting democracy, of how we need to deal with individual cases, etc.—if we dealt with them democratically, I think we'd have a way forward.

And neither side should be nervous about discussing these things. Democracies will differ from autocracies in the way they approach these issues. There's no question. But that doesn't give us the right to prescribe our way to other people. So, there are limits to this. The extent to which one interferes in other people's business––doesn't mean you don't have opinions or that you don't express them––but I think, ultimately, the whole point of democracy is that the people make their own decisions about their own future and choose their own systems and how they want to operate them. And that's, for me, the key.

GRAY: So, how important is it that President Biden this week pushes Prime Minister Modi on its dealings with Russia and its human rights record when the US-India relationship is more nuanced and potentially far more critical to US interests than these issues of concern, like, say, both the United States and India's interests in keeping China in check in the Indo-Pacific? Shivshankar has his own take.

India is kind of the great example of how this new Cold War framework doesn't really work, because India and a lot of countries need to work with both the United States and Russia and China. But this new kind of nonaligned movement rhetoric has taken shape with respect to the war in Ukraine and China. You've argued this isn't a new nonaligned movement. This isn't the Cold War. Why is today different?

MENON: For three big reasons, as far as I can see. The situation is different. The Cold War saw a bipolar world with two camps which barely traded with each other, only talked to each other sometimes, but offered completely contrasting views and visions of how the world should be run and how societies should be ordered and were in competition across the globe between the West and the Soviet or socialist camp, which China belonged to initially and then left. In that kind of bipolar world, you could be nonaligned because there was somebody to be aligned to. Today, I don't think we're in a bipolar world at all. I know some people think it's a bipolar world between China and the US, but today, if you look at it, economically, yes, the world might be multipolar––there’s the EU, there’s the US, there's China. There's large economic blocs being formed. But militarily, it's still a unipolar world. There's only one power which can project military power across the globe when it wants where it wants, and that's the US. The others are all regional military powers. Even the Chinese are basically contending in their own near seas and in the spaces near China in military terms. So, China-US relations are very different from Soviet-US relations. China's no ideological competitor. The economic linkage between the two—they're like Siamese twins. Six-hundred ninety-one billion dollars’ worth of trade last year. Neither of them can actually disengage beyond a point without doing real damage to themselves. So, politically, it's a very confused world.

This is a world, for me, between orders. It's a world adrift. So, what are you being nonaligned with or from? My own formula for this kind of situation, therefore, is that you are unaligned. I mean, you're not aligned to any single bloc or group of countries, but what you see instead in practice is issue-based coalitions of the willing. Depending on the issue, you get a different set of countries working together, those who are both willing and capable of doing something about an issue. Take maritime security in the Indo-Pacific, for instance. The Quad forms itself naturally, right? And they have to work maritime security, but they also work on providing global public goods. But if you look at cybersecurity, you have a whole different set of actors who have capability and interests in taking care of those issues. When it comes to security in Europe, this is primarily something between NATO, Russia, and which Europeans will have to sort out among themselves. Frankly, the rest of us can say what we think, but we don't have very much influence on how that is going to be sorted out.

So, depending on the issue, when the pandemic occurs, it's one set of actors who step forward. It's not the traditional multilateral system or the older institutions. In fact, the pandemic revealed how pathetic those institutions have become in their responses. Think of how different our response was to HIV-AIDS and to COVID. And you see actually the deterioration in the international system, or the traditional multilateral system. So, this is why, for me, this is a world between orders, where you can’t now talk of a traditional nonaligned movement all over again in a very different situation.

The other thing, of course, is that economic power is now much more evenly spread across the world. And therefore, when it comes to economic issues, but it's also in some ways much more––politics is in command of economics now to an extent, which it wasn't so before. To look at the debt crisis among developing countries, over 55 developing countries, according to the IMF, face a real risk of a serious debt crisis. And we've known this now for five years. And the IMF has been telling us. Every G20 has made statements about it, and yet nobody has done anything about it. We have transnational issues like climate change, for instance, where ultimately, at core, when you look at what countries have done internationally as an international community, what have we done? We've just said each country is free to do what it will do, but it won't even allow anybody else to check what it does. That's not concerted international action on a matter of life and death for us all on the planet.

So, for me, therefore, we are in a much more difficult situation than I think we were even at the height of the Cold War. And the pillars of the old order have broken down, whether it's the nonproliferation regime, whether it's the international financial order, which people are now trying to nibble away at. So, for me, this is a whole new territory we've entered into. And it's not enough to just say, “Oh, we're going back to traditional nonalignment.”

GRAY: Let's talk more about the pillars of the order that have broken down, because, for a lot of analysts here, the argument is that the West's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine showed the robustness of the liberal, democratic international order that so many countries were able to band together in response and sanction Russia. Is your argument that the order is not there, or that it was broken previously? Do you share that perspective?

MENON: Well, the Western response showed how cohesive the West is, and it actually showed how the West, and particularly NATO, and transatlantic relations—how solid they were. I'm not sure it showed any international order at work. Frankly, the so-called liberal international order, which people talk about, for many of us in the world for the last 70 years or so, it has neither been liberal nor very orderly. The killing fields of the Cold War were all across Asia. That's why people died. And if you look at deaths in combat, if you look at displaced persons both internally and international refugees, we are now back to post-war levels, back to the late forties when the Chinese Civil War was going on and when Europe was in shambles. So orderly.

As I mentioned already, if there were an international order, where was it when the pandemic happened? The last time there was a concerted international response—orderly response—to a problem was, I think, the G-20 meeting in London in April 2009, when, together, the G-20 managed to avert another Great Depression, did manage to shore up the international banking system, and did actually do things which made a huge difference to the global economy. But since then, it's hard to think of something the international order has done in response to the big challenges of the day—whether it's development, whether it's, as I said, developing countries’ debt crises, whether it's climate change, whether it was the pandemic. I wish there were an order. Gandhi was asked, “What do you think of British culture?” He said it would be a good idea. And that's my response to those who say, “What do you think of the liberal international order?” It would be a great idea.

GRAY: Interesting. Transitioning into more of a discussion about China, it seems like the Biden administration and lawmakers here in the United States use this US-China rivalry as a ploy to say this is why we need the liberal international order to be restored. This is why it's so important. In some of your writing, I suspect, do you feel the US-China rivalry is actually distracting from a more orderly world? Is that fair to say?

MENON: I take the US-China rivalry as given. It’s structural now. The US has always worked to prevent the emergence of a peer competitor in the international system since World War II and has done so successfully. It saw off the Soviet Union, Japan, etc. And from the Chinese point of view, I think you now have President Xi Jinping actually naming the US and saying she's trying to contain China, prevent China's rise. And that is a huge step. So, when you get to that stage, then I have to take that as a fact of life, as the major factor of international geopolitics today.

That doesn't mean this is another Cold War, because they're not separate. As I said, they are intertwined. Their futures are intertwined. Their economies are intertwined. And there's a whole host of issues on which both will have to work together for their own self-interest. But what I would put my faith in, rather than some new emerging international order, is the enlightened self-interest of all these countries. While they might be rivals, I think it's in their self-interest to avoid conflict and to concentrate on the big transnational issues.

And India, like the US, has the same problem with China. We are both economically very tied to China. India's largest trading partner in goods is China. If you add services, it's the US. And we run a huge trade deficit with China. At the same time, we have a political relationship which is fraught. Ever since the clashes on the border in 2020, we've had over 100,000 troops lined up along the line of control in the western sector, in Ladakh and western Tibet, at really forbidding heights and in terrible climate. They've been through three winters up there, and they're still there. And there's no real drawdown visible. And the US has the same combination of competition and cooperation at the same time in the relationship with China. India and the US tend to see many of the consequences of the rise of China—and some of China's behavior—very similarly, as affecting international order and as actually increasing uncertainty and risks in the international situation.

How do we solve this? Do we solve this by all signing a piece of paper and signing on to the same principles? Or do we rely on the traditional realist tools, which is to create a balance of power, which works to encourage responsible and sensible behavior and incentivize people through using their own, as I said, enlightened self-interest, because it's in everybody's interest that we do so and that we avoid the rivalry or the competition from actually taking an unexpected turn or getting out of hand? I would rather rely on that than on creating an order out of a world where, as I said, power is so distributed. Economic power is differently distributed from military power and certainly from political power.

GRAY: You were ambassador to China for India, and I believe you speak Mandarin and have spent a lot of time in the country. What do people in general get wrong about the Chinese Communist Party and their decision-making?

MENON: I think what we miss is how internally-driven China's external policies are. I think, for most of us, what happens in China, internal politics, is a black box. And since it's so hard, so opaque, so hard to penetrate or to understand, I think we put it out of mind, and we then concentrate on the traditional external explanations—the situation has changed, China's ambitions abroad, reacting to what other people do, etc. All we rely on ascribing everything to personality. It's all either Deng Xiaoping or Xi Jinping's doing or Mao Zedong's doing. And I think that's a mistake. China has politics just like all the rest of us. Then ultimately, it's internal politics that matter to the politicians who make the calls. And I think we tend to underestimate that. That doesn't mean I have all the answers, that I know, therefore, what we're China's going to do. But for me, that's the fascinating part.

But let me say this. Compared to when I first started working on China, which is 55 years ago, I think we are much better at understanding China today than we were then, not just because there's expertise and because China opened up, and there was a period when we've had a lot of exchanges with China—all of us—but also because I think we've started understanding how China works much better than we did before.

GRAY: My last question is going back to your comment about the debt crisis a lot of countries in the developing world are facing, that we're not paying close attention to here in the US since we're so focused on US-China rivalry and the war in Ukraine. Can the United States play a role, or should it be playing more of a role and mitigating the harm surrounding the debt crisis, climate change, and these transnational issues? What are officials in India hoping to see more of from the United States?

MENON: India has been trying––since it’s the present chair of the G-20––I think they've been trying to get international action going together, working with the IMF and a whole group of countries, because it has to be a multilateral effort, and it has to involve a whole host of countries together. The problem is if we leave it to individual countries—Sri Lanka is a good case in point. Sri Lanka defaulted in April 2022 on about 20 percent of its foreign debt to China. The West was naturally reluctant to bail out Sri Lanka to give Sri Lanka money to pay back the Chinese. The Chinese were reluctant to reschedule their loans to Sri Lanka until the West did something. So, it became a standoff, actually.

If you leave it to traditional great power politics, frankly, it's never going to be solved. In fact, great power rivalry makes it harder to deal with debt issues in developing countries. And it has to be something the community as a whole agrees on and starts implementing. And that's what we are trying to do in this year when we are chairman of the G-20. And I think we've made some progress. At least, I heard the India of the IMF saying we have, but I think we still have a little bit of way to go.

GRAY: As Shivshankar argues, US-India relations are strong and will likely only get stronger, especially after this week's official state visit. And this is all despite India's reluctance to impose sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and Prime Minister Modi's track record on human rights. It seems the US-India partnership is far more important to both countries than we realized.

I'm Caroline Gray, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to thank Shivshankar Menon, our guest, for joining me today. Special thanks also go out to the None of the Above team. Our host is Mark Hannah, who will be back next episode, and our associate producer and editor is Sara Leeson. If you enjoyed what you heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Please rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.

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