An India-China axis?

Joseph S. Nye Project Syndicate

Is a new alignment between India and China rising to balance America's global power? Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao just completed a four-day visit to India during which 11 agreements were signed, including a comprehensive five-year strategic cooperation pact. In addition, Wen announced that China would support India's bid for a permanent seat on an expanded UN Security Council, and opposed the inclusion of Japan, which the United States supports for a Council seat.

With over a third of the world's population and two of the globe's highest economic growth rates, an alliance between China and India could be a serious factor in world politics. While both are developing countries -- many of whose people remain impoverished -- they also boast impressive capabilities in information age technologies both for civilian and military purposes. As Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put it during Wen's visit, "India and China can together reshape the world order."

The two countries' recent rapprochement marks a huge change from the hostility that bedeviled their relations following their 1962 war over a disputed border in the Himalayas. When I first visited India as an American government official in the late 1970s, I was struck by my Indian hosts' fixation on gaining equal status with China. In 1998, when India tested its nuclear weapons, the defense minister referred to China, and then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee spoke of China as India's number one enemy.

By contrast, on more recent visits to India, I have found my hosts referring to the need to learn from China. Trade between the two giants has grown from US$100 million in 1994 to nearly $14 billion last year, and India's minister of commerce and industry has predicted that it will double by this decade's end. One agreement signed during Wen's visit was a new set of guiding principles on how to settle boundary disputes between the two countries.

While improved relations and diminished prospects for conflict are welcome, relations between India and China are more complex than they appear at first. Not long before the visit of the Chinese premier, India hosted U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Ever since President Bill Clinton's visit to India, but especially under President George W. Bush, the U.S. has moved from relative indifference to India to the development of a strong strategic relationship.

This new approach might have seemed threatened by al-Qaeda's attacks on America, which led to a strengthening of U.S. relations with Pakistan's Gen. Parvez Musharaff. But the U.S. reassured India that they faced a common threat from transnational terrorism, and that the old Cold War pairings of India and Pakistan were outdated.

Secretary Rice made this plain during her March visit, stressing the importance of a strategic relationship, including a willingness to consider trade in high technology, nuclear energy, and co-production of fighter aircraft such as F-16's and F-18's.

Shortly after Rice's visit, the U.S. announced that it would honor a long-standing promise to sell F-16's to Pakistan.

While the announcement incited Indian protests, they were relatively muted compared to the past. One reason is that the State Department also issued a statement that America would help India to become a major world power in the twenty-first century, involving both a strategic and economic dialogue.

Several factors underpin this new American attitude toward India. Rhetoric about "the world's two largest democracies" is not new, but it fits with the Bush administration's new emphasis on promoting democracy. The increasing role of the Indian diaspora in the U.S., particularly in the information industries, also had an influence, as has the rise in bilateral trade accompanying India's surging economic growth. Equally important are strategic concerns about transnational terrorism and the rise of Chinese power.

The rise of China is a major factor in the politics of the twenty-first century. China has tripled the size of its economy in the past two decades, and has been increasing its military strength. While both India and the U.S. seek trade and good relations with China, both are aware -- and wary -- of China's growing strength.

Thus, both seek to hedge their bets, and what better way to do so than by improving their strategic relationship? Neither country aims to restrain China in the way the "containment" strategy aimed at an aggressive Soviet Union during the Cold War, but both want to create an international structure that does not tempt China to throw its weight around.

India has a 3,000-kilometer border with China, a 2,000- kilometer border with Pakistan (which has been the beneficiary of Chinese military and nuclear assistance), and growing concerns about the security of sea routes in the Indian Ocean over which oil and other trade move.

As one Indian strategist put it to me during a recent visit, "By 2030, we envisage the U.S., China, and India as the three largest powers in world politics. We don't want a China- or a U.S.-dominated world, but it we had to choose, it would be easier for us to live with the latter."

So, while improvement in India-China relations is welcome, it is unlikely to herald the beginning of an India-China alliance against the U.S. Rather, it more likely represents another move in India's age-old tradition of managing regional balances of power.

Joseph S. Nye, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense and dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, is now a professor at Harvard and author of The Power Game: A Washington Novel.