Indians beware! Fresh back from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s June 22-23 state visit to the United States, U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti gave a major policy address at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, presenting the U.S. vision for “A New Chapter in U.S.-India Relations” after Modi’s visit, which in Garcetti’s view had outstripped expectations. The former Mayor of Los Angeles framed his speech as a Hollywood script: “In Hollywood—the land of the sequel—the most crucial question is always `what happens next?’ ”
Stepping up defense cooperation was at the top of his list in answering that question. In the run-up to Modi’s visit, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar had already shot down proposals emanating from little minds in the U.S. Congress that historically non-aligned India be invited to join the group of NATO-plus nations. So Garcetti was not so stupid as to mention NATO. Instead, he pushed for accelerating the “co-production” of defense matériel and equipment agreed on in Modi’s visit, for jet engine production and drone purchases. He proposed developing “the interoperability” of the U.S. and Indian militaries as a way to “institutionalize trust.” Therefore, there should be joint deployment of U.S.-Indian military forces in the Indo-Pacific region “against those who would upend the common good for their own benefit.” There was no need for him to name Russia and China specifically.
India already conducts more military exercises with the United States than it does with any other country, Garcetti said, but the U.S. is proposing something else: “We can deploy our ships together in the Pacific and Indian oceans, and even beyond, to ensure maritime security. We can employ our air forces across the Indo-Pacific region to ensure freedom of the skies and the seas…. We can coordinate our land-force exercises across regions to bolster the sovereign defense of all countries who want to work with us.”
India has not responded to this “offer,” despite misreporting by such Indian press as The Hindu, that the Ambassador had said that India is willing to deploy in this fashion. The U.S. Ambassador said only that both nations “can” deploy jointly.
But it’s worth noting a concerning comment in Foreign Secretary of the Indian Foreign Ministry Shri Vinay Kwatra’s report in his June 23 briefing at the conclusion of Modi’s trip to the U.S. In it, he said that “some decisions and announcements with regard to placement of defense personnel in each other’s facilities to better understand different systems and their operations” had been made.
