A recently released report by two influential US scholars calls for accelerated military cooperation with India and terms the Indian nuclear weapons arsenal an “asset in maintaining the current balance of power in Asia.
‘Revising US Grand Strategy towards China’ authored by Robert D Blackwill, former US Ambassador to India and Ashley J Tellis, an analyst intimately involved in negotiating the 2008 Indo-US nuclear deal, says the US ‘benefits from the presence of a robust democratic power that is willing to and capable of independently balancing Beijing’s rising influence in Asia’.
The report, which some analysts term nothing less than an agenda for war with China, calls for the US to ‘vigorously support India’s ‘Act East’ policy to strengthen its power projection into South East Asia and East Asia, far beyond India’s current sphere of influence from the Gulf of Aden to the Malacca Straits.
The crux of the report prepared for the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, is that China’s rise threatens US global dominance and outlines a series of political, diplomatic and military means to reverse it. The report lists several countries with whom the US must accelerate military cooperation, Japan, South Korean,
It recommends that the US substantially loosen its restraints on military technology transfer to India and systematically assist India in building maritime capabilities in the Indian Ocean and beyond through substantial technology transfer, develop a global counter-terrorism relationship with India and further incentivize it to sign defense cooperation agreements including the Logistics Support Agreement, the Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geospatial Cooperation.
