The head of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris, gave a
highly provocative speech in New Delhi last week in which he laid out
the “next steps” in Washington’s strategic agenda for India. Claiming to
be “a bit moonstruck…by the opportunities a strategic partnership with
India” provide, Harris said he envisioned the US and Indian navies
jointly patrolling the Indian and Pacific Oceans in “the not too distant
future.”
He also urged India to form a quadrilateral security “dialogue” with
the US and its closest military allies in the Asian-Pacific region,
Japan and Australia.
Later the same day, Admiral Harris proposed that the recently
established annual trilateral Indo-US-Japanese naval exercise take place
off the northeast shore of the Philippines, just outside the South
China Sea—a contested region where the US has been encouraging its
allies to press their territorial claims against China.
In sum, Harris urged India to become a “frontline state” in the US
drive to strategically isolate, encircle and potentially wage war
against China.
By virtually any measure, India is a poor country. But US imperialist
strategists, including the Pentagon war planners, have been touting it
as a “strategic prize” since the beginning of the 21st century. The
efforts to harness India to US imperialism’s predatory global agenda,
through a combination of threats and poison-chaliced inducements, have
greatly intensified since the Obama administration announced its
anti-China “pivot” in 2011.
US strategists covet India for multiple reasons. It is the second
largest of the world’s “emerging economies.” It has a huge military,
armed with nuclear weapons and a rapidly expanding blue-water navy. From
a geostrategic standpoint, it dominates South Asia (the Indian
subcontinent), providing a potential base of operations for projecting
US power across much of Eurasia, including towards neighbouring China
and the energy-rich Middle East and Central Asia.
Last but not least, India protrudes far into the Indian Ocean,
providing easy access to the entire northern half of that ocean, which,
as a recent US Naval War College-sponsored study notes, “has replaced
the North Atlantic as the central artery of world commerce.”
The strategists of US imperialism view dominance of the Indian Ocean
as essential to US global hegemony. First and foremost, because it is at
the heart of US plans to impose an economic blockade on China through
strategic maritime “chokepoints” in the event of war or war crisis. But
also because the Indian Ocean is a key staging ground for US military
operations in the Middle East and East Africa.
In pursuit of its own great-power ambitions, the Indian bourgeoisie
has tilted ever more decisively toward Washington, even as the US has
emerged as an incendiary power that wages illegal wars and otherwise
violates national sovereignty and precepts of international law at will.
The Congress Party-led government that ruled Indian from 2004 to 2014
entered into a “global strategic partnership” with Washington, helped
legitimize its efforts to isolate and bully Iran, and rapidly expanded
ties between the Indian military and the Pentagon, including weapons
purchases.
In the 22 months during which Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have formed India’s government, New Delhi
has integrated itself ever more fully into Washington’s strategic
offensive against China.
This has included:
- Joining Washington in painting China as the aggressor in the South
China Sea, although it is the US that, in the name of “freedom of
navigation,” is arrogating to itself the right to patrol China’s shores
and to have in place the naval might to quickly seize the Straits of
Malacca and other strategic chokepoints;
- Expanding bilateral and trilateral military-security cooperation,
including military exercises and strategic planning, with the US, Japan
and Australia;
- Collaborating across South Asia in countering Chinese influence,
including in the January 2015 regime-change operation in Sri Lanka that
saw Mahinda Rajapaksa replaced by a president ready to degrade Colombo’s
ties with Beijing and launch a security “dialogue” with Washington.
Harris’s New Delhi speech was aimed at stoking suspicions and
inflaming tensions between India and China, the better to bind New Delhi
to America’s strategic agenda. It is part of an unrelenting campaign to
force China to forgo any challenge to US global hegemony.
Earlier last week, Harris ordered an aircraft carrier-led US Navy
strike force to enter the South China Sea. This week, the US and South
Korea launched their largest ever Korean Peninsula war game, and did so
on the basis of a new operational plan that provides for pre-emptive
strikes on North Korea and the occupation of the North up to the Chinese
border.
It took Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar a full two days to
respond to Harris’s speech, indicating that the BJP government was taken
aback by the admiral’s public airing of Washington’s “asks” of India.
Parrikar rebuffed the suggestion that India will mount joint navy
patrols with the US, but in a manner that very much left the door open
to such a possibility in the future.
The BJP has already reversed the decision taken by the previous
government and supported by India’s military-security establishment to
reject three agreements the Pentagon considers “foundational” for joint
action with foreign militaries. The agreements had been rejected on the
grounds that they threatened Indian sovereignty and security.
According to press reports, when US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter
travels to India next month he will sign at least one of these—a
Logistics Support Agreement (LSA) giving the US military routine access
to Indian ports and naval bases, including for refuelling. The LSA’s
importance is underlined by the comment of a high-level Indian official
who last December said that the only remaining hitch in giving the US
military access to Indian bases was, “What happens in the case of war?”
The burgeoning military-strategic alliance between US imperialism and
the Indian bourgeoisie constitutes a huge threat to the masses of South
Asia and the world.
Washington is drawing on the political and military support given it
by New Delhi to recklessly pursue a confrontation with nuclear-armed
China, a course which, whether deliberately or through miscalculation,
threatens to ignite a world war.
The Indian bourgeoisie, for its part, is using the enhanced
diplomatic, military and geopolitical power it derives from its junior
partnership with Washington to pursue its longstanding goal of imposing
itself as the regional hegemon of South Asia. Under the BJP, India has
aggressively asserted its interests with all its neighbours, including
building new military installations along the disputed border with
Pakistan and instructing army commanders in the disputed Kashmir region
to be more militarily assertive. Last year saw the worst border clashes
between India and its nuclear-armed rival, Pakistan, in more than a
decade.
Pakistan has repeatedly warned that Washington’s strategic embrace of
India has overturned the balance of power in South Asia, fuelling an
arms race—warnings the US has cavalierly ignored. These warning have
become shriller in the past year due to the strengthening of the Indo-US
alliance and Modi’s efforts to bully Pakistan. Militarily, Pakistan has
responded by announcing the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, and
politically, by seeking closer ties to China.
Aware that the US was intent on harnessing India against it, Beijing
long sought to avoid antagonizing India and attempted to enlist it as a
partner in its land and sea Eurasian transport initiatives. But with
Modi integrating India into Washington’s anti-China “pivot,” Beijing has
moved to place Pakistan at the center of its plans to circumvent
America’s “chokehold” strategy, announcing that it will invest $46
billion in a Pakistan Economic Corridor linking western China with the
Pakistani Arabian Sea post Gwadar.
The US, which has used the Pakistani elite and Pakistani military as
satraps in its geopolitical machinations for the past six decades, is
not about to cede Pakistan to China. The axis between the Pentagon and
Pakistan’s military is a source of continuing mistrust and friction
between New Delhi and Washington.
Nevertheless, Washington’s strategic offensive against China and its
drive to make India the south-western pillar of its anti-China “pivot”
have an incendiary geopolitical logic: the US-China conflict is becoming
ever more entwined with the reactionary geopolitical conflict between
India and Pakistan, adding to each a highly explosive new dimension.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained
in its statement “Socialism and the Fight Against War,” published last
month, the only progressive basis on which to oppose Washington’s insane
attempt to uphold US global hegemony through aggression and war is to
counterpoise to the imperialists’ war map the map of the class
struggle—that is, the building of a global working-class movement
against war on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
Keith Jones/wsws
