In a surprising departure from the usual warmongering articles published by Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which bills itself as the “world’s oldest and the U.K.’s leading defense and security think tank,” senior associate fellow Tim Willasey-Wilsey penned an article July 17 provocatively entitled, “Washington’s Indian Delusion.” The former diplomat, academic and highly-placed member of the British establishment, warns that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi certainly derived benefits from his June 22-23 state visit to Washington, especially military deals, but the U.S. is badly mistaken if it thinks it has secured India as a strategic ally in the Indo-Pacific or moved it from its traditional non-alignment.
India, he underscores, “has no intention of sacrificing its ‘strategic autonomy’ to join the Western camp against China, or of abandoning its friendship with Russia.” By any standard, he adds, Modi’s trip to Washington would be considered a great success. It has urgent military requirements to replace antiquated Russian hardware which the U.S. is anxious to fill. This “might suggest it is ready to abandon its Russian ally. But this could not be further from the truth,” Willasey-Wilsey writes.
