This article is from the cover package in the Fall 2024 print issue, featuring letters from thinkers around the world. Read all nine letters here.
What would you want to tell the next U.S. president? FP asked nine thinkers from around the world to write a letter with their advice for him or her.
Dear Madam or Mr. President,
Seventy-seven years ago, on India’s gaining independence, President Harry S. Truman said that in the United States, India would find a constant friend. It is such constancy that defines the expanding partnership between our two democracies. In the last two decades particularly, we have together achieved spectacular improvements in bilateral relations.
This letter, however, focuses on an area perhaps insufficiently grasped as the United States contemplates the India of today—that is, its self-definition as a civilizational state and its vision of strategic autonomy and multipolarity in global affairs.
The world of 2024 is vastly different from that of 1947, when India gained independence. The rules-based international order to which both our countries have pledged allegiance is in danger of falling apart, and in this season of change, Western dominance is waning. One is reminded of the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, who said in reflection in 1961: “The West, the entire West, was changing, was breaking up.”
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East underscore the West’s weakness. Asia is the epicenter of change as countries such as India and China reassert themselves on the global stage. China has led the way with its dramatic rise; its authoritarian, quasi-imperial assertiveness on land and sea borders with its neighbors, including India; and its strategic competition and rivalry with the United States, which have defined new contours of conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
India, too, is taking strides globally. Its presidency of the G-20 in 2023 saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi speak about India’s growing leadership as a “Vishwaguru”—a teacher to the world—and as a nation founded on a civilizational base that stresses the welfare and happiness of all humanity. He referred to the surge of pride in India’s lunar mission, landing on the moon at a spot no one had reached before. India was becoming, Modi said, the voice of the global south, and it would not “bend before anyone.” India’s democracy was a “beautiful gift, a bouquet of hope” for all humanity, and its multilingual and multicultural diversity has imbued it with “great power.”
How should this civilizational power think about forging relationships with other countries? Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar says India’s partners should be “chosen on interests and not on the basis of sentiments or prejudices”—a nationalist diplomacy of Indian exceptionalism. What is seen by many in the country as hectoring by the West over democracy and human rights is rejected outright. At the same time, although India is “non-West,” it sees little profit in “being anti-West.” This image of new and alternative poles of power, as manifest in India, marks the dawn of a multipolar world.
Multipolarity, as India sees it, is what Jaishankar recently termed a “natural expression of global diversity.” While U.S.-China competition looms over the horizon today, power is becoming more diffuse and is no longer concentrated in one or two superpowers. The power of the United States to use its tremendous military power and bases across the world to deter conflict or check aggressive behavior or defeat religious extremism and radicalism (as in Afghanistan) is increasingly in question. At the same time, the image of the United States as a polarized and fractious polity and society is relayed across the world. This provides ample fodder for adversaries such as China and a surrogate Russia to challenge U.S. and Western dominance. Furthermore, many rising and middle powers, with concerns about peace and stability in their regions, including in the global south, are seeking to protect their own geopolitical and economic interests and refusing to be drawn into the web of great-power rivalries.
There is the impression that our American friends are uneasy about India’s vigorously expanding identity. The same week in July that Modi visited Russia, U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti said at a conference in New Delhi: “I respect that India likes its strategic autonomy. But in times of conflict, there is no such thing.” India and the United States would, he said, need to “act together.”
There is no hint of dogma in the Indian approach; it is just the closely held conviction of successive Indian governments from the time of independence onward that the country will not be swayed by bloc politics, alliance systems, or competing ideologies on the global stage and that when a crisis presents itself, India will decide on the course to follow independently, on its merits, and guided by realism.
What makes India’s approach resonate today—and also what makes the United States and others uncomfortable—is that it is propelled by growing military and economic power, the assertion of its civilizational uniqueness, and its increasing geopolitical weight. This creates a new balance of global interests that the West cannot dismiss or ignore.
Certainly, our ties with the United States—though cordial and marked by considerable strategic convergence, particularly in the Indo-Pacific—have recently been strained. Take India’s relations with Russia. Comments such as Garcetti’s, expressing their disappointment about Modi’s visit to Moscow, have sharpened such differences. India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, although it stresses the importance of dialogue and diplomacy over conflict. Indian imports of oil from Russia over the last two years have grown substantially in the face of U.S. opposition, and Russia continues to be the source of some 40 percent of India’s defense imports. But India argues that its national security and the welfare of its population are paramount, and it is on that basis that India continues to forge ties with Russia.
Nonetheless, the strategic imperatives in the consequential India-U.S. relationship, and their numerous areas of convergence—including in defense and security, trade and investment, energy and technology, global cooperation, and our people-to-people ties—should outweigh such differences.
There will always be some points of contention on foreign-policy issues between our two countries, as there will perhaps be under your administration, but remember that there is no zero-sum game here. The India-Russia relationship, for instance, does not in any way eclipse the indispensable character of the India-U.S. strategic partnership. India’s active membership of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad—with Australia, Japan, and the United States—demonstrates our strategic commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. This investment in many ways has evolved at a much faster pace, and with much more substantive content, than India’s involvement with bodies such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation or the Russia-India-China trilateral forum, both of which pre-date the Quad.
There has never been a greater need for both our nations to understand each other better. Our democracies seek cooperation, connectivity, and respect for the global commons and the rules-based international order. India’s desire for a steadily improving non-alliance partnership with the United States remains strong and unflinching. It is embedded in the practice of an independent foreign policy with security interests that, by virtue of India’s geographical location, are complex and multifaceted. This is an approach that you will understand because it is not so different from the path that the United States has followed since its inception as a republic.