ONE OF the Biden administration’s principal mantras is that “America is back” on the international stage, having returned after a four-year absence during the delinquent Trump administration. In truth, however, the Trump administration never left international politics, and through active diplomacy promoted a wide range of U.S. interests during its tenure. Nowhere was this more evident than in its energetic efforts to advance the United States’ relationship with India. If China was the competitive centerpiece of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, strategic partnership with India was one of its most important cooperative pillars.

This attention to India may seem curious for an administration supposedly motivated by a myopic transactionalism. India is not a U.S. treaty ally. It has struggled economically and, despite significant improvements in recent years, continues to face serious developmental challenges and resource constraints. And it often disagrees with the United States on important strategic questions. Why, then, did U.S.-India cooperation become so important to the Trump administration? What steps did the Trump administration take to advance it? And how can the United States, under the Biden administration, most effectively build on the progress of the last four years?

China’s growing power enables it to engage in a range of economically and militarily coercive policies in the Indo-Pacific, threatening the region’s independence and security. The United States lacks the resources to resist this behavior alone, or even together with its regional treaty allies, however. It therefore must forge new partnerships, with states that wish to offset Chinese power, but are not part of traditional, U.S.-led alliance structures. India’s size, preferences, and location uniquely suit it for this role.

Although core elements of this approach emerged during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Trump administration built on them, developing their logic more fully. The administration recognized the importance of what it called great-power competition, and deliberately reoriented U.S. strategy toward it; explicitly identified China as the United States’ primary great-power challenge; drew the connection between the Chinese challenge and the need for new cooperative relationships in the Indo-Pacific; and understood India’s unique advantages as a partner. It then set out to enhance Indian strategic capacity through far-reaching policy efforts in a range of areas including military interoperability, technology sharing, bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, and defense trade.

The strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific has not improved since the 2020 presidential election, and is unlikely to do so in the near future. Close U.S.-India cooperation, therefore, remains essential. The Biden administration, despite its wholesale criticism of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, will need to build on the previous administration’s success. To this end, I offer five principles that can help the United States expand on the Trump administration’s achievements and guide future U.S. policy toward India. By maximizing trust between the United States and India; tempering military expectations of India to meet the actual demands of Indo-Pacific strategy; accepting an “open” diplomatic relationship with India; ensuring that U.S.-India cooperation supersedes competing interests within the foreign policy bureaucracy; and avoiding false equivalence between India and Pakistan, the United States can continue to advance U.S.-India relations and achieve one of its most urgent strategic tasks.

THE UNITED States’ most serious strategic concern is rising Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific region. The reason is straightforward: it is an area of tremendous economic and demographic importance, with about 60 percent of the world’s population and home to the world’s largest youth populace, with approximately 700 million inhabitants between fifteen and twenty-four years of age. In the next ten years, the region will likely contain four of the world’s five largest economies in terms of purchasing power parity—China, India, Japan, and Indonesia. By 2030, the Indo-Pacific will generate more than half of the world’s economic output, consume over half of the world’s food, and use 40 percent of its energy. The region’s sea lines of communication (SLOCs) comprise the world’s busiest trade routes, carrying one-third of all bulk cargo and two-thirds of all oil shipments. These shipments include 80 percent of China’s and 90 percent of Japan’s and South Korea’s oil. This traffic must cross the Strait of Malacca, Asia’s most important chokepoint and the primary passage between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

To ensure the security and prosperity of this strategically vital region, the United States and the international community sought to engage a rapidly rising China in the decades following the Cold War. They hoped that as China became more deeply enmeshed in international institutions and enjoyed the benefits of economic cooperation that its preferences and behavior would become less competitive and more liberal. These efforts were unsuccessful. Indeed, the more deeply the United States and the global community engaged China, the less cooperative, and more illiberal, it became.

Today, China threatens the Indo-Pacific region through a variety of means, including predatory development schemes, coercive dispute resolution, territorial reclamations, rejection of international law, and the subversion of international institutions to promote its interests. A rapidly growing economy and an increasingly sophisticated military with burgeoning area-denial capabilities have facilitated this behavior. If unchecked, China will increasingly be able to impede access to the Indo-Pacific and exert economic leverage over the region, isolating the United States and other states from critical lines of communication, markets, and supply chains; damaging their prosperity; and threatening their security. Preventing Chinese regional hegemony and ensuring that the Indo-Pacific remains “free and open” has thus become the United States’ primary strategic goal.

The United States’ ability to resist China and maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific will depend on its ability to cooperate with other regional countries. Although the United States remains the world’s most powerful state, it lacks the resources to keep the Indo-Pacific free and open alone. The United States’ need for cooperation, of course, is not new; America has long relied on NATO in Europe and on treaty allies like Japan, South Korea, and Australia in Asia to help meet its strategic challenges.

NATO will be of limited utility in offsetting Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific. The region is far out of area for the alliance. Members are divided over the degree of threat that China poses, as well as the combination of competition and conciliation that constitutes the best response to it. NATO leadership, while recognizing the Indo-Pacific’s increasing importance, will not commit to participation in military operations there. Some NATO states, in their national capacities, are willing to deploy naval forces to the region. But distance from the Indo-Pacific will limit the scope of their presence, keeping it mostly at the symbolic level.

U.S. allies in Asia are more directly threatened by China’s rise and are in closer agreement with each other regarding the danger that Beijing poses. Given their location in the region, they also are better able to maintain a military presence there. But their primary focus is East and Southeast Asia, and operational and political constraints limit their ability to project power westward into the Indian Ocean and beyond. Consequently, the United States will have to transcend its legacy alliances in both Europe and Asia, forging new partnerships with states that possess the requisite heft, interests, and geography to help it offset rising Chinese power throughout the Indo-Pacific.

India has these qualities. It is a continent-sized power, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, and from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. It shares a 2,100-mile land border with China. Its population is the world’s second-largest. It has roughly the fifth-biggest economy in the world, which has expanded rapidly, if sometimes unevenly, since economic liberalization in the early 1990s. It is a longstanding democracy and, with a brief exception during the 1970s, has held regular, contested elections since achieving independence. It sits astride crucial sea lines of communication connecting Europe, the Middle East, East Africa, and East Asia. And it is deeply worried about rising Chinese power, having fought a bitter 1962 war with China over a still-unresolved, and periodically violent, border dispute. In the broader Indo-Pacific, it shares the U.S. dedication to preventing Chinese hegemony and ensuring a free and open regional order.

To be sure, India’s strengths as a partner are tempered by a number of challenges: India’s economy is smaller, and has grown more slowly, than China’s; its armed forces are less numerous and sophisticated than the Chinese military; and although indicators such as poverty rates have improved sharply in recent years, it still faces enormous domestic developmental challenges. These problems will be worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, which has imposed huge costs on the Indian economy.  India and the United States also have diverged on a number of policy issues, like nuclear proliferation, the rules governing U.S.-India trade, and relationships with problematic third-party states such as Russia, Iran, and Pakistan.

Although these challenges are significant, they do not diminish the importance of the U.S.-India relationship. Rather, they make clear to India the impossibility of resisting China alone and the need to work closely with a stronger partner such as the United States. They underline for the United States the importance of helping to build India’s strategic capacity so that it can more effectively compete with China in the future and share the burden of keeping the Indo-Pacific region open and free. And they highlight for both countries the need to focus their cooperative efforts on core areas of strategic agreement, without allowing less important policy differences to distract them and undermine their partnership.

EARLIER U.S. administrations, recognizing the increasing importance of the Indo-Pacific region, coupled with the challenge of rising Chinese power, took important steps to promote U.S.-India strategic partnership. For example, the George W. Bush administration’s Defense Framework Agreement facilitated cooperation in a range of areas, including multilateral operations, bilateral defense trade, and technology transfer. Its U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement also afforded India access to civilian nuclear materials and technologies despite India’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Obama administration subsequently made India an important figure in its “pivot” or “rebalance” strategy, which began shifting U.S. strategic resources to Asia to more fully engage the region while hedging against increasingly competitive Chinese behavior. To this end, the administration took a number of steps, included the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative, to create opportunities for U.S.-India co-development and production of defense-related technologies.

Building on these earlier bipartisan efforts, the Trump administration took three important steps that significantly strengthened the strategic logic underlying U.S.-India cooperation and enabled the United States to operationalize the two countries’ partnership well beyond previous levels. First, the administration reoriented U.S. strategy away from its longstanding focus on terrorists and other non-state actors to concentrate on what it called “great-power competition.” In doing so, it made clear that although non-state dangers remain serious, powerful nation-states, which are increasingly able to approach or match United States strategic capabilities, now pose the greatest threats to U.S. interests. The administration also explained that because cooperative U.S. policies failed to mitigate these threats in the past, the United States has to be prepared to compete with rival states in the future.

Second, the Trump administration recognized that transition to great-power competition requires it to focus particularly on the dangers of a rising China. Earlier administrations had appreciated the possibility of such dangers, but still believed that cooperative efforts could shape Chinese preferences and behavior and, as a senior Obama administration official put it, “induce fidelity to international norms.” The Trump administration noted that, despite these earlier cooperative policies, China has become less accommodating and more confrontational, and now poses the most serious threats to U.S. interests. The administration, therefore, made clear that, if the United States is to take great power rivalry seriously, the ability to resist China will necessarily be of paramount importance.

Third, the Trump administration, despite its reputation for unilateralism, recognized that competition with China had important cooperative implications for its diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific region. As the recently declassified U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific shows, the administration believed that “strong U.S. alliances [were] key” to its ability to achieve its regional objectives. It, therefore, would seek to “strengthen the capabilities and will” of core treaty allies like Japan, Korea, and Australia, and also develop new regional partnerships with “like-minded” states that were willing to share the task of maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific region. It made the development of these new partnerships a centerpiece of its approach to the Indo-Pacific.

The Trump administration believed that India would be of particular importance to this project. One of the Strategic Framework’s central assumptions was that “a strong India” “would act as a counterbalance to China” in the Indo-Pacific. The United States would, therefore, “accelerate India’s rise and capacity to serve as a net provider of security” and “solidify an enduring strategic partnership with India.”

The Trump administration’s approach led to important milestones that further operationalized the U.S.-India relationship. For example, after years of acrimony and false starts, the two countries finished signing the so-called foundational agreements, which will significantly facilitate U.S.-India military cooperation by enabling geospatial information sharing and logistical support. The U.S. Defense and State Departments, together with the Indian Ministries of Defence and External Affairs, institutionalized an annual 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue to discuss and promote cooperation on pressing foreign policy, defense, and strategic issues. Both countries, together with Japan and Australia, revitalized the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, laying the foundation for a four-way regional partnership to address issues ranging from supply-chain resilience to health security and military exercises. The United States renamed its “Pacific Command,” calling it “Indo-Pacific Command,” to emphasize the importance of India and its region to U.S. strategy. Moreover, the United States eased high-technology export controls by granting India Strategic Trade Authorization-1. U.S.-India defense trade, which was non-existent as recently as 2005, reached approximately $20 billion in 2020.

These were not the accomplishments of an administration that was absent from, or indifferent to, the U.S.-India relationship. Rather, they resulted from the Trump administration’s energetic efforts to prioritize and promote U.S.-India cooperation. There is no need to “come back” to U.S.-India relations under President Joe Biden; America never left the relationship.

Of course, Biden will want to put his own stamp on India policy. To this end, he may bring changes to the U.S.-India relationship, focusing more on issues like climate change, human rights, and nuclear nonproliferation. These differences aside, however, the strategic realities that the new administration faces in the Indo-Pacific region will not change in the near future; the United States will continue to need Indian help to anchor a coalition of Indo-Pacific states to offset rising Chinese power. Working closely with India to help build its strategic capacity will remain a central U.S. priority. Can the new administration capitalize on past achievements and continue to advance the U.S.-India partnership in the years to come?

Despite a considerable degree of forward momentum, success in advancing the U.S.-India relationship is not assured; potential roadblocks stand in the way. Even decades after the Cold War’s end, India and the United States do not fully trust each other, and may reflexively shrink from full-fledged cooperation. Setting unrealistic military and diplomatic requirements for success may create the impression that these improvements will never deliver on their promise, and are not worth pursuing vigorously. Working levels of the foreign policy bureaucracy can adopt their own priorities, ignoring the cooperative goals of national leadership. And an outmoded tendency to formulate India policy on the basis of balancing “India-Pakistan” equities can prevent the United States from aggressively pursuing cooperative opportunities.

What steps can the United States take to avoid dangers such as these, and ensure that the United States and India are able to build on past successes and cooperate even more closely in the future? Below, I offer five principles for continued success in the U.S.-India relationship. They are not specific policies, but rather are operating principles based on the history of U.S.-India relations, the current strategic environment, and coming challenges that the two countries are likely to face.

FIRST, PRIORITIZE trust between India and the United States. Trust is the most important component of the U.S.-India relationship. No matter how worthy their goals or astute their policies, the United States and India cannot effectively cooperate if they distrust each other. And no matter how acrimonious their policy differences, a bedrock of trust can enable the two countries to devise successful compromises.

Lack of trust between the two countries—in particular Indian suspicion of the United States—was a serious problem during the Cold War, and continued to impede cooperation even as interests converged in the years that immediately followed. During this time, India viewed the United States effectively as a neo-colonialist power and feared unwelcome meddling in its affairs. Because of major improvements in recent decades, the issue of trust between the two countries has become less prominent, and is often overlooked entirely. But it remains a significant obstacle to continued progress.

Some of the old Indian worries about U.S. or other foreign meddling linger. They resurface periodically, especially when outsiders criticize Indian domestic policies on human rights or other normative grounds. This will always be a potential source of tension, and Washington will have to strike a balance between advocating its values and recognizing that Indian democracy operates in the context of its own history, domestic political imperatives, and external threats, and will never look exactly like democracy in the United States or Western Europe. 

In truth, however, a perceived danger of interference in India’s affairs is no longer the major source of Indian distrust of the United States. Instead, India worries about the opposite—that it cannot trust America to remain sufficiently engaged in joint efforts to check rising Chinese power. If India is to partner closely with the United States and risk antagonizing an already-aggressive China, it must be confident that the United States will not subsequently abandon it to face China on its own. Although Indian confidence on this issue has been increasing, it remains a concern.

The United States can instill confidence in India in several ways. In its public and private rhetoric, it can consistently voice its determination to keep the Indo-Pacific free and open, and its opposition to Chinese behavior that undermines this goal. It can also reiterate its belief in the importance of the U.S.-India strategic partnership, and its continued commitment to helping India become a strong, independent node of regional power.

Additionally, the United States can energetically support India during crises. U.S. backing during the 2020 Sino-Indian border clashes, both in public and behind the scenes, and well-publicized U.S.-India naval exercises that the two countries conducted during the crisis, helped to reassure India of U.S. reliability. A quicker U.S. decision to provide India with vaccine-related materials during its disastrous second coronavirus wave would have been similarly helpful. Although the United States ultimately agreed to supply the materials, the delay of several days caused an outcry in India, reinforcing for many Indians the view that the United States cannot be fully trusted.

Finally, the United States can continue to liberalize rules regarding the export of dual-use technology to India. Technology sharing will both build Indian strategic capacity and serve as a strong indicator of U.S. reliability, especially to Indian leaders skeptical of close U.S.-India relations. By reducing the trust deficit, these measures can ameliorate perhaps the most foundational problem in U.S.-India relations and facilitate robust cooperation between the two countries.

SECOND, DO not confuse India’s military constraints with a lack of strategic utility. India faces numerous military challenges, including aging equipment, sclerotic procurement processes, and stagnant defense budgets. The enormous expanse of the Indo-Pacific, and China’s formidable resources, only magnify these problems. This has led some critics to suggest that India may lack the wherewithal to serve as a useful U.S. strategic partner.

Such pessimism is unwarranted. India’s military constraints, though real, need not prevent it from meaningfully contributing to U.S. strategic efforts in the Indo-Pacific. The United States has limited aims in the region; it does not seek to control the Indo-Pacific, or to exclude China from it. Rather, the United States seeks the less demanding goal of preventing China from establishing regional hegemony. India can support this effort through relatively modest measures. It does not need to create extensive power-projection capabilities, which are costly, operationally challenging, and potentially provocative. Rather, at present, India can focus on the easier task of self-defense, protecting its land borders and home waters against forceful Chinese attempts to change the status quo. Even this limited approach will impede Chinese efforts to expand its regional power.

China poses its most immediate threat to India along the Sino-Indian land border, which is the subject of a decades-long dispute and the locus of periodic violence. In the summer of 2020, dozens of Indian and Chinese soldiers died in border clashes in Ladakh, the first killed in the dispute since the 1970s. Conventional wisdom has generally been pessimistic regarding India’s military options in the border region, and the recent clashes have evinced reasons for concern. Caught by surprise, India appears to have lost hundreds of square kilometers of territory to Chinese incursions. Although it eventually succeeded in achieving a stalemate, India may well be unable to restore the status quo ante.

Nonetheless, careful analysis suggests that India is in a reasonably strong defensive position in the border region, thanks to a number of advantages that it enjoys. These include short lines of communication, improved logistics, better aircraft and air bases, augmented air defenses, and longstanding experience in high-altitude warfare. In addition, Indian nuclear forces can reach major Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu. India can enhance these capabilities through relatively modest measures, such as replacing or upgrading older aircraft; improving intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; augmenting conventional long-range strike assets; and increasing the redundancy and mobility of its nuclear weapons. Even within its current constraints, then, India should be able to mount a capable defense against future Chinese land threats.

In the maritime domain, as on land, India enjoys a number of defensive advantages. Particularly important is its geography, which features close proximity to crucial SLOCs connecting Europe and the Middle East to Asia, as well as possession of outlying island chains such as the Andamans and Nicobars. Utilizing submarines, anti-submarine warfare assets, land-based aircraft, mobile precision-guided missiles, and small surface ships close to home, India can protect its own waters, generate intelligence for itself and its partners, and potentially contest Chinese access to SLOCs and chokepoints. Such a defensive approach will be far less costly and complex than attempting to develop a significant power-projection capability.

A solid defense will not allow India to attack China across the Sino-Indian border, or join the United States or other partners in operations in the South China Sea or the Western Pacific. But it will enable India to make an invaluable contribution to regional strategy by serving as a continent-sized barrier against Chinese expansion into the South Asian and Indian Ocean regions. India may lack the ability to do more for the foreseeable future, but from the standpoint of U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, it does not need to.

THIRD, ACCEPT an “open” relationship with India. India does not wish to establish a formal alliance with the United States, and the United States does not need it to do so. To contribute to the goal of maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific, India needs above all to remain diplomatically independent. An Indo-Pacific region composed of independent states will necessarily resist Chinese hegemony, even if those states are bound only by informal ties and do not belong to a treaty-based alliance structure.

The United States should thus keep its partnership with India close but informal. It should not strive to create a relationship modeled on its legacy alliances or devalue the relationship because it does not meet traditional alliance standards. The United States can expect India to be “like-minded,” but it should interpret that term liberally. India and the United States do need to be like-minded in their commitment to resisting Chinese hegemony and promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific region. Otherwise, however, India should be able to disagree with the United States and go its own way on a variety of strategic matters.

One of the most important of these matters is India’s relationships with third countries that the United States finds problematic, such as Russia and Iran. This is a significant irritant in U.S.-India relations. India established a close partnership with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, formalizing strategic coordination through the 1971 Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation; procuring Soviet military hardware on favorable terms; and providing the USSR with reliable diplomatic support. With Iran, India has deep civilizational ties, as evidenced by the large Indian Shia population. India has also relied on Iranian oil exports to meet its energy needs.

The United States has pressured India to distance itself from both states. India has partially complied, reducing its level of security cooperation with Russia while working far more closely with the United States, and boycotting Iranian oil at the United States’ request. Still, these relationships will not disappear entirely. India will continue to purchase a significant amount of Russian defense equipment, especially when it needs to keep legacy systems operational or when it has been unable to acquire a particular capability or technology elsewhere. It also will stay involved with Iran, as evidenced by ongoing Indo-Iranian projects such as the development of Chabahar Port.

The United States can, of course, encourage India to modify its policies toward problematic countries in particular cases. As a general matter, however, the United States should accept India’s third-party relationships. As an increasingly active and important regional power, India will need to maintain relations with a wide variety of states—even states that the United States does not like. And, after all, the United States maintains close friendships with states that India dislikes intensely, such as Pakistan. Although India takes an extremely dim view of U.S.-Pakistan relations, the United States expects the Indians to recognize that the relationship has its own imperatives, will remain important for the foreseeable future, and does not undermine the significance of U.S.-India relations. If Washington refuses New Delhi similar flexibility, and seeks exclusivity in U.S.-India relations, it will drive India away, rather than drawing it closer.

FOURTH, SUBORDINATE competing bureaucratic interests to the strategic goal of advancing U.S.-India cooperation. Senior U.S. leaders have consistently emphasized the overriding importance of advancing U.S.-India relations. Former Obama administration Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, for example, said that the U.S.-India relationship would “define the twenty-first century,” necessitating “a presumption of approval for transactions with India … in the defense-technical sphere” that would allow the United States “to do things with India that have never been done before.” Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed these views, stating that cooperative efforts with India had to be “ambitious” and promote “interoperability, with common platforms, shared doctrines, and new technologies.”

As noted above, U.S.-India strategic cooperation has, in fact, grown dramatically. Nonetheless, the United States has fallen short of fulfilling its leadership’s ambitious vision. Despite senior-level clarity regarding the importance of U.S.-India cooperation, opportunities to share technologies and platforms have often stalled within the U.S. system. This has happened when working levels of the bureaucracy prioritized other goals, such as strategic stability in the India-Pakistan rivalry, nuclear non-proliferation, and technology export controls. As a result, the United States has often been unwilling to share particular technologies, thereby preventing U.S.-India cooperation in important areas such as air and missile defense and aircraft sales.

Cooperation in these areas would have enhanced India’s strategic capabilities and advanced U.S.-India defense ties. But the two countries’ failure to cooperate has not been just a lost opportunity to move forward. This failure has actively threatened to force the U.S.-India relationship backward, as it has encouraged India to look elsewhere for its defense needs. Consequently, India has made problematic purchases, like the Russian S-400 air-defense system, which could lead to U.S. sanctions. This outcome would undermine years of effort to build trust and advance the U.S.-India relationship.

The United States must ensure that the foreign policy bureaucracy’s pursuit of its own goals does not undermine national strategic aims. Senior leadership can help by enunciating clearly where U.S. strategic priorities lie. Pompeo, to this end, issued State Department-wide guidance emphasizing both the general importance of U.S.-India cooperation and the need to remove specific obstacles to technology transfer that would impede defense sales and other strategic coordination. Current senior leadership should do likewise. Reinforcing the message can help to avoid not just lost opportunities, but also prevent damage to the U.S.-India relationship resulting from misplaced priorities.

FIFTH, AVOID false equivalence between India and Pakistan. For decades, policymakers spoke of India and Pakistan in the same breath, treating the two countries as a single, hyphenated entity united by a common conflict. Although this practice has become less common in recent years, the United States has still often devised policy toward India or Pakistan with the opposing state in mind. As a result, the United States has limited its strategic cooperation with India, and enhanced its cooperation with Pakistan, hoping to prevent India from gaining a strategic advantage that would upset regional stability.

This has led the United States to refuse to share important military technology with India; to classify India as a “proliferation concern,” which has impeded the ability of senior Indian officials to travel to the United States; and to publicly equate Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons capabilities, stating that it takes a similarly critical view of each country’s forces. Meanwhile, this approach has led the United States to sell Pakistan advanced military equipment such as the F-16 Fighting Falcon; to make Pakistan a major non-NATO ally, a designation reserved for only the United States’ closest strategic partners; and to give Pakistan over $70 billion in military and economic assistance, making it Pakistan’s largest single aid donor.

This approach is misguided. India is far more important to the United States than Pakistan. India’s territory, population, military, and economy are much larger, and its interests and preferences converge more closely with the United States than those of Pakistan. Unlike Pakistan, India does not view China as an “all-weather friend,” does not nurture and deploy Islamist militants as strategic assets, opposed Taliban domination of Afghanistan, and has been a responsible steward of nuclear weapons and technologies. If the United States pursues an artificially “balanced” South Asia policy, it will miss opportunities to advance strategic cooperation with India, indirectly support Islamist militancy, and strengthen China’s hand.

The United States needs to be prepared to accept a certain amount of imbalance in its approach to South Asia: publicly criticizing bad Pakistani behavior; conditioning further aid to Pakistan on the implementation of more constructive Pakistani policies; and aggressively pursuing U.S.-India cooperation, even if doing so risks tipping the regional balance further in favor of India. Given the stakes in the Indo-Pacific, that is a price worth paying. The principle of equivalence is increasingly irrelevant to the current strategic environment and should no longer guide U.S. policy in the region.

THE UNITED States is not “back” in the U.S.-India relationship—it never left. The Trump administration, building on a bipartisan legacy of cooperation from the Bush and Obama eras, made U.S.-India partnership a centerpiece of its foreign policy, strengthening its underlying logic and reaching important policy milestones. This would not have happened had the Trump administration been absent or indifferent. Today, the Biden administration does not need to begin the U.S.-India relationship anew. Rather, it needs to build on what its predecessors already have accomplished. Grounding its India policy in the principles that I have offered can help the new administration to do just that, avoiding pitfalls that could stymie U.S.-India cooperation, and leveraging opportunities that will advance it. Doing so will increase the likelihood that the United States, India, and their like-minded partners are able to offset rising Chinese power, and ensure that the Indo-Pacific region remains free and open.

S. Paul Kapur is a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2020–2021 he served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. The opinions of this article are his alone.

Image: Reuters.