US President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi agreed to comprehensive defense and economic partnerships when Modi
visited the White House in late June for a summit with Biden.
“The US-India Major Defense Partnership has emerged as a pillar
of global peace and security,” the joint statement from the summit reads.
The US will provide India with support to develop
infrastructure that will be used to resupply, repair and maintain ships and
aircraft.
“We’ll
have much more to follow in the near future, but the aim here is to make India
a logistics hub for the United States and other partners in the Indo-Pacific
region,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, to
reporters in late June.
As part of this effort, the US Navy will sign ship repair
agreements with Indian shipyards.
The navy has concluded a Master Ship Repair Agreement with
the Larsen & Toubro shipyard near the Indian city of Chennai, according to
the White House. The navy is close to finalizing separate deals with two other
shipbuilders, based in Mumbai and Goa.
The US military looks to build readiness for quickly
handling resupply activities and repairs in the Indo-Pacific region. If the
navy has access to more hubs in the region, then vessels and aircraft will
waste less time pausing operations for both. The time savings can be allocated
to joint exercises with other countries.
“There’s a big gap between the bases the United States
sustains in the bilateral hub agreements they have in the Middle East and then
the Western Pacific,” said Jeffrey Payne, assistant professor at the Near East
South Asia Center for Strategic Studies. “So, India fulfills this.”
At present, Japan and Singapore serve as key naval hubs for
the US in Asia.
Harry Harris, former commander of US Indo-Pacific Command,
hailed the initiative.
“Currently, we operate from Diego Garcia and Western
Australia in the Indian Ocean,” he told Nikkei via email. “Securing a
maintenance, repair, and logistics hub on the Subcontinent is significant as
this would give us much-needed flexibility in the vast Indian Ocean region.”
The
Chinese navy has about 355 ships and submarines, making it the world’s largest
numerically, according to the 2021 edition of the Pentagon’s annual report on
China. If American vessels cannot spend more time at sea, then the US will risk
falling behind China in terms of naval capabilities, weakening deterrence.
Because the Indo-Pacific is defined by large stretches of
water, many believe that conducting supply activities in the region during
emergencies will prove more difficult than similar activities in Europe, with
its land routes.
“Are we ready today? Yes, we are,” Rear Adm. Mark Melson,
commander of the US Navy’s logistics group stationed in Singapore, told Nikkei in
an interview in early June. “But I will never claim to be ready enough.”
“We are certainly trying to improve the amount of access
into a number of places where we can conduct expeditionary resupply,
expeditionary refuel [and] if required, expeditionary rearm,” Melson said.
The Biden administration plans to deepen the partnership
with India beyond the Indian Ocean in the maritime space. Daniel Kritenbrink,
assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, attended an
event hosted by a US think tank at the end of June and touched on strengthening
the collaboration with India in the South China Sea.
Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar met
with Philippine Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo in New Delhi at the end of
June. The two ministers released a joint statement that backed a 2016
arbitration ruling at The Hague rejecting Chinese claims to nearly all of the
South China Sea.
This marked the first time that India expressed support for
the Hague ruling, which is based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of
the Sea, according to Gregory Poling, a senior fellow at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington. It put India in line with
Japan and major Western countries on the issue.
India, as a representative of the so-called Global South
emerging and developing countries, is gaining a stronger role and voice in the
international community.
On the security front, India appears to have shifted focus
on relations to the West. Modi’s visit to Washington in June is evidence of
this. India on Tuesday hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit,
which was held in a virtual format out of consideration for the US
But the basic theme of India’s diplomacy remains “strategic
autonomy,” which entails working with other countries according to its own
interests.
In
recent years, the US apparently threatened to impose sanctions on India when it
sought to acquire air defense systems from Russia. In 1971, the US sent an
aircraft carrier to threaten India during the third Indo-Pakistani War. Whether
today’s partnership between the US and India will completely dispel the latent
distrust of Washington remains to be seen.
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