What lies beneath India-US defence pact

EVEN as the ink is still drying on the Major Defence Framework Agreement between the United States and India, the choice of the venue for signing this compact, on the sidelines of the 12th ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) recently, itself speaks volumes.

It very poignantly underscores the current strain in the India-US relationship. The signing was a ceremony of convenience, a ritual reaffirmation conducted on neutral ground, for neither India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh nor US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth found it politically expedient to travel to the other country’s capital.

This geographical nuance is the first clue to the complex and convoluted, though profoundly pragmatic, foxtrot that this agreement represents. It is not a grand alliance forged in the fires of shared ideology, but a tactical entente negotiated in the portentous shadow of shared apprehensions.

This framework had its genesis in 2005, when the US was playing to a different rhythm in the aftermath of the deadliest attack on American soil after the Pearl Harbour incident (December 7, 1941). The attack that took place on September 11, 2001, colloquially called 9/11, shook the spectre of US unipolarity to its very roots, given that a non-state actor, al-Qaeda, had carried out an unprecedented assault on American sovereignty.

In retribution for the attack, the George W Bush administration launched an all-out assault on Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, christening it a war on terror. This led to a fundamental restructuring of the US force posture globally, compelling it to seek partners beyond its traditional Atlantic and Asia-Pacific treaty allies.

The Congress-led UPA government in New Delhi, under the leadership of Dr Manmohan Singh, saw an opening to end India’s technological isolation and the nuclear apartheid it had been subjected to since 1974, when it carried out its first nuclear test. It used defence cooperation with the US as the key to open the doors for lifting global sanctions on India’s civil nuclear programme and inviting private participation to augment it.

Even Russia did not substantively oppose India’s overtures to the West. Though China was rising, its assertiveness was measured, its “wolf warrior” diplomacy yet unborn, and its network of military bases in the Indo-Pacific a spectre of the future.

The Indo-Pacific was a novel and nascent concept, being nurtured by the likes of former Japanese Prime Minister late Shinzo Abe. The US and its allies, ranging from Japan to Australia, saw India as a probable counterweight to a resurgent but then non-belligerent China.

Today, the context is inverted. Beijing’s global outreach and its sprawling network of military bases have made the “China threat” one of the organising principles of American defence strategy. The Quad is yet to be properly institutionalised despite its tenuous existence since 2007.

Russia, now a Union State with Belarus and an antagonist of the West, has been India’s primary source of discounted crude oil since 2022. These purchases have recently, perhaps temporarily, been moderated by Indian refiners under the threat of secondary sanctions. This creates a fundamental schism in the geo-economic postures of Washington and Delhi.

The US, under the second Trump administration, has metamorphosed from exceptionalism to transactionalism, buoyed by the Make America Great Again (MAGA) brigade. The US is again contemplating a G2 world order with China. It was first mooted in 2009 during Barack Obama’s Democratic presidency. The G2 implicitly subverts the multipolarity that India sees as its manifest destiny.

In this maelstrom, the renewal of the framework is a gambit shrouded in profound ambiguity. For India it seems to be a necessary hedge, a symbol of continuity deliberately initialled in a moment of discontinuity.

This, unfortunately, is a marriage of convenience, not a shared vision. Delhi’s political silence in the face of President Trump’s repeated assertions of US mediation, singularly misplaced as they are, to end India’s kinetic action against Pakistan in May continues to be deafening.

India’s pragmatic alignment with the Taliban on Afghan sovereignty and its continued preference for Russian energy, notwithstanding the current hiatus, are clear signals that its commitment to the US-led system is now conditional. The agreement seems to be an instrumentality for Delhi to keep the Americans engaged while trying to resolve the contentious imposition of exorbitant and unwarranted tariffs, humiliating deportations and the H-1B visa issue.

From Washington’s perspective, the renewal is at best an act of strategic retention. The Trump administration, for all its disdain for traditional alliances and its cosy overtures to Islamabad, cannot afford to let the linchpin of its Indo-Pacific strategy simply unravel. A complete estrangement from India would be a geopolitical gift to Beijing and Moscow of incalculable value.

Thus, the framework serves as a placeholder, a mechanism to keep India within the gravitational pull of American influence, even as the two nations publicly disagree on Russia and privately distrust each other’s ultimate intentions. It is an acknowledgment that, for all its frustrations with India’s independent streak, the US has no viable alternative partner in the Indian Ocean Region capable of acting as a counterweight to Chinese expansionism.

The public hyphenation of India and Pakistan by Trump may satiate some alleged business interests, but the quiet renewal of a 10-year defence pact seems to reveal a more profound and enduring calculation within the Pentagon and the wider US strategic community.

To ask, therefore, if this renewal is a sign of strategy or weakness, of wisdom or folly is an avoidable binary. It is a continuum born out of shared strategic imperatives. It is a policy commitment in its recognition of a shared, overarching challenge, yet it is an act of symbolism because the substantive policy underpinnings required to give it true meaning — a convergence on Russia, a common approach on state-sponsored terrorism emanating from Pakistan and a congruence on the contours of a future global order — are glaringly absent.

For now, the renewed defence agreement stands at best as a wager that the strategic imperative of balancing, if not containing, China continues to dictate. This outweighs even the acute divergences of the present for both the US and India. Whether this wager is a stroke of genius or a grand delusion is a question that only the unforgiving tribunal of the future would provide an answer to. For the present, the continuity in defence cooperation with the US should be welcomed.