The United States Should Look East with India

The United States Should Look East with India

10/10/14

Melissa S. Hersh, Ajey Lele

Foreign Policy, India, United States

"While U.S.-Indian relations have suffered some diplomatic tensions, it’s time to look at the big picture and focus on strategic alignment, not petty posturing." 

According to the insightful, Nobel Prize winning Amartya Sen, India is prone to being mischaracterized. Accordingly, the United States must see the bigger picture and look beyond India’s fickleness and vacillation in order to recognize that there is a bidirectional relationship that needs to be maintained.

This lesson is important to recall during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit last week. As India’s foreign-policy tentacles reach further east and west, Washington’s expectations for U.S.-Indian relations need to remain steady. While India can be a fulcrum for leveraging U.S. interests in both Central and East Asia, it should also be an anchor partner that practices a different brand of democracy that may align with the United States on many—but not all—things. The United States should support India in its efforts to broaden its neighborhood interests and should not be alarmed when India aligns itself on occasion with China or Russia.

Former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh believed that India’s Look East policy would represent a strategic shift in India's vision of the world and place in the global economy. And India’s engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been on a swift trajectory since a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was signed in 2010. Modi’s actions can be seen as an actualization of Singh’s vision of economic liberalization. The Look East policy is rapidly becoming an Act East policy; this escalation signals an engagement that extends beyond Japan to other Southeast Asian countries.

With the solidification of an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) on the horizon for 2015, India’s reach will extend from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Overland, beyond the Indian Subcontinent, India will have access to Vietnam and Singapore. Myanmar plays a key role as the route for major connectivity between India's landlocked northeast and southeast. Connectivity corridors like the Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multi-modal Project are rapidly transitioning into development corridors.

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