Hearing on “India, China, and the Balance of Power in the Indo-Pacific”

Commissioners, thank you for the opportunity to testify at today’s hearing. There are few relationships that have the potential to be as consequential to the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as to the future contours of the global order, as the U.S.-India partnership. After decades of positive momentum in this partnership, the past year has been a rocky one, which has exposed underlying fragility in the bilateral relationship. With the announcement of a framework for an interim trade deal between the United States and India, both nations now have an opportunity to reexamine our partnership and consider how best to put it on a more stable and enduring footing in the future. I commend the commission for taking up this important topic and for its interest in exploring the role Congress can play in advancing one of America’s most consequential relationships.

I’d like to take a few moments to discuss the strategic underpinnings of the U.S.-India partnership, as well as the challenges and opportunities now facing policymakers in Washington and New Delhi. Finally, I would like to offer several recommendations to help rebuild a more secure and mutually beneficial partnership in the future.

A Partnership of Unique Consequence and Scale

In March 2021, I arrived in India with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on his first official visit to the country. No one realized at the time, but India was already in the early throes of a devastating COVID-19 wave that would soon produce hundreds of thousands of new infections every day. Within weeks of the visit, the U.S. military surged to execute an enormous airlift, sending multiple planeloads of testing kits, masks, antiviral medicine, and the raw materials needed to produce life-saving vaccines. The airlift was not merely an offer of unilateral assistance. It was also, as former U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken noted, a chance to pay forward the medical help India provided to the United States in the earliest days of the pandemic. As the domestic situations in both countries stabilized, the United States and India would soon come together again—through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad)—to deliver millions of vaccine doses to countries across the world.

This story illustrates what make the U.S.-India partnership unique and immensely consequential. At its best, the U.S.-India partnership has a nearly unparalleled capacity to deliver technological ingenuity, industrial capacity, and human capital resources for the benefit of both nations and for partners around the world. Take, for example, the semiconductor industry—the United States leads the world in chip design, yet approximately 20 percent of the world’s chip design engineering talent is located in India. Similarly, as the world races to more fully harness the power of artificial intelligence, India and the United States each have distinctive, and potentially complementary, advantages in data and cutting-edge model generation. And for many U.S. companies seeking to reduce overdependence on Chinese supply chains, India’s vast
manufacturing potential makes it a particularly important partner.

As authoritarian nations such as Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) align more closely, likeminded democracies around the world are facing new pressure to not only counterbalance authoritarian advancements but also to demonstrate that democracies can still deliver on the promise of economic growth, production, and prosperity. In the face of this generational challenge, democracies must, as my former colleagues Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi have argued, leverage “allied scale” in order to compete more effectively. Equally important, democracies will need to scale their combined capabilities more quickly in order to blunt destabilizing Chinese military and technological developments over the next decade, a period of time that some officials have referred to as a “decisive decade.” A closer alignment between the United States and India will be essential to both of these ambitions.