'America First strategy has potential to damage Indo-US ties'

WASHINGTON: Warning that Donald Trump's 'America First' strategy has the potential to "damage" Indo-US ties, Indian-American expert Ashley Tellis, who is speculated to be the next envoy to India, has said the President-elect needs to strengthen bilateral relations to cope with the challenges posed by China.
"Trump's 'America First' strategy has the potential to damage the US-India relationship. Trump should instead strengthen India's alliance to cope up with the challenges posed by China," said Tellis, senior fellow, South Asia Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a top American think-tank.

In an op-ed published in Asia Policy by the National Bureau of Asian Research, Mumbai-born Tellis said that the variety of positions expressed by Trump suggests that the potential threat to the continuing transformation of US-India relations comes less from his views on India--which are probably unsettled--than it does from his iconoclastic convictions about the relationship between the US and the world.

According to a recent report in The Washington Post, the incoming Trump Administration is considering nominating Tellis as the next American Ambassador to the US.

Neither Tellis nor the Trump Transition Team has responded to questions on the news reports.

Tellis, 55, argues that while many elements of Trump's nationalist agenda are understandable--even defensible--the worldview it represents diverges from that which initially cultured the evolving US-Indian partnership.

"Going back to the earliest years of the George W Bush administration, the US' rapprochement with India was premised on the assumption that the principle strategic problem facing both countries consisted of the rise of China and the threat it posed to both US primacy and Indian security--not to mention the safety of the US' other Asian partner and allies-- simultaneously," he wrote.

"Since it was assumed that the United States would subsist as the principal protector of the liberal international order, and the Western alliance system in particular, even in circumstances where the containment of China was impossible because of the new realities of economic interdependence, the Bush administration slowly gravitated toward a strategy of balancing China by building up the power of key states located on its periphery," Tellis said.

Tellis observes that the current US commitment to the rise of Indian power sans symmetric reciprocity was devised during the Bush administration but has been faithfully continued by Obama for very good reasons.

It was anchored in the presumption that helping India expand in power and prosperity served the highest geopolitical interests of the US in Asia and globally--namely, maintaining a balance of power that advantaged the liberal democracies, he said.

"Accordingly, it justified acts of extraordinary US generosity toward India, even if specific policies emanating from New Delhi did not always dovetail with Washington's preferences," Tellis wrote.

"Given that what India could become--a power capable of successfully balancing a rising China--mattered more for US interests than what New Delhi did on any other issue, US policy for almost two decades has embodied a calculated altruism whereby Washington continually seeks to bolster India's national capabilities without any expectations of direct recompense," he said.

Tellis warns that if New Delhi fails to satisfy the anticipation of reciprocity embodied by an America-first policy--a likely prospect given India's resource and power constraints--both nations will have ended up worse off.

"Without the benefit of a preferential affiliation with the US, India's challenges with regard to managing a rising China (and even a troublesome Pakistan) will have become considerably more difficult," he said.

"The United States in turn will have lost the opportunity to preserve an advantageous Asian balance of power, which by incorporating a strengthened India actually constrains Chinese ambitions and thereby buttresses US primacy for more time to come," Tellis wrote in the op-ed.