The Uncertain Future of U.S. Relations With India

29:24So there are different components that I think we need to be investing in. And none of those require a formal alliance which is centered on collective defense. Neera Pabha, let me go to you on this question of multi-alignment. My sense is that's quite central to India's sense of its own strategy. This has gone under different names in different eras. Strategic autonomy is related to this. It was non-alignment during the Cold War. What is the case for multi-alignment or strategic autonomy as a necessary feature of Indian foreign policy? What do you think Ashley's critique there gets wrong? First of all, I don't think we should refute the fact that strategic autonomy is not central to the Indian interest.

30:10Our geostrategic context, first of all, is very unique. I know that Ashley is not arguing that we should become alliance partners of the U.S., and we are not treaty allies, obviously, and nor do we share a historical or ideological military alliance tradition like NATO members do with the U .S. I think the United States needs to appreciate, and many do, but still I think there are people who have dissenting opinions on that, we should understand that India sits at the crossroads of the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia. And it's bordered by unstable regions, we all know, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, and very complex powers like China and Russia.

30:54The idea of cooperative defense, as Ashley said, we need to develop the concept further. But as I see it, if we are thinking of a relationship whose parameters involve a more tighter defense relationship with the United States, what is at the back of India's minds? I mean, I'm not part of the policymaking circles in Delhi, but I can sense it. I mean, it's part of muscle memory. We are concerned about provoking China into greater aggression across the line of actual control. We all know that the Chinese are paranoid. They're horribly insecure of any moves that we make which bring us closer to the United States.

31:36There is, of course, increasing Pakistani military dependence on China, which further destabilizes the subcontinent. And we saw that, of course, in full play during Operation Sindhur. And then there is certainly this shadowy specter of whether we're going to alienate Russia. Russia has been a historic defense partner, major arms supplier, and we would like to maintain strategic diversification. That's number one. The second thing is about India's military posture. Now, while China enjoys conventional military superiority, it's true, India has no pushover, and our recent responses, whether it was Galwan or Operation Sindhu, they've demonstrated India's willingness and capability to assert our sovereign interests and without leaning excessively on external powers.

32:29I'm not in any way discounting whatever assistance we receive from the United States, but I think we have also acted independently and as a sovereign power when it comes to dealing with these threats to our national security. And we are ramping up indigenous defense production, may I add, although we're still far away from the targets that we've set for ourselves. So I would say we are not in the business of practicing alignment mechanisms, perhaps. It's more hedging strategies, even if that sounds quite cliched. And I think that when you say that the China-Pakistan nexus may necessitate a much closer relationship between India and the United States, I don't think we're throwing that argument out the door.

33:15But it's just that we feel that overalignment may entrench the Sino-Pakistan axis further, given the two-front threat scenario that we face. Now, Ashley also mentions that India tends to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. But I want to say that strategic ambiguity or strategic autonomy is not hypocrisy. It's really, from the Indian point of view, the practice of quite sophisticated statecraft. Because we're not being opportunistic. We're not being duplicitous. It is more strategic hedging. And mind you, this is not a technique for which India holds the patent alone. It's a technique practiced by ASEAN nations and even major powers like France.

34:01So therefore, we buy arms from Russia, we cooperate with the U.S. on defense technology, and we balance both in multilateral diplomacy. Now, what would we do during crises, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Taiwan? Well, we've chosen interest-based neutrality. We ensure our energy security by importing energy from Russia. And we've been very open and very emphatic about keeping open the lines of economic engagement with the West. So in my view, this is being pragmatic and we've rejected any binaries which sort of slot the world into oppositional fields, China versus the United States or vice versa.

34:44So don't force us into any situation of binary alignment. We'd like to continue to straddle worlds, the Global South and the Great Power Club. There's a very strong post-colonial identity in India and has historical solidarity with the Global South. And at the same time, we want to engage with great power platforms, with the Quad, the G7 Plus Outreach, high-tech defense cooperation. and we don't reject or fully embrace any ideological camp. We prefer issue-based coalitions and we really balance continental and maritime priorities. As a Eurasian land power, we share very complex relations with China, Pakistan, Russia, Central Asia.

35:32As an Indian Ocean power, we have growing stakes in Indo-Pacific maritime security where we partner with the US, Japan and Australia. So this is a kind of dual identity. You might call it Janus-faced, but this really is the best for India. We have to be nimble at practicing nuanced navigation, not rigid alignments. So in many ways, this is until we really arrive at great power status while we are ascending the ladder. I know we're rising, we lag behind very much, of course, behind the U.S. and also to a large extent behind China. and we are battling infrastructure gaps. We battle poverty. We battle governance challenges.

36:16But our foreign policy is really shaped by our aspiration in terms of how we define where we are going. And we operate within certain constraints. We would like to lead, but we first have to seek to stabilize ourselves. So it's not indecision, but it's a position that we've chosen with care and deliberation And strategic maturity really requires such restraint and such pursuit of situations that provide for balancing mechanisms. In fact, I always liken India very much to the early United States, a new republic navigating hostile great powers, uncertain about where to commit itself. And like early American foreign policy, we have avoided entangling alliances until we are fully capable of shaping outcomes according to our own terms.

37:12Now, I'd like to just take the point that Ashley mentioned about how do you encapsulate the relationship between India and the United States today? And I would define it as strategic convergence without a formal alliance, a partnership of shared interests, but not shared obligations. And that, I think, is where the dissonance comes in. And I think the United States has come by and large to accept India's unique path, recognizing our role as a strategically autonomous, but a like-minded power. We are friends with overlapping interests, but not identical agendas. Trubha, I want to go to you on this question of strategic autonomy and why you believe that it, or multi-alignment, which I don't believe the term you use but is often related, is in fact a necessity for India.

38:06But let me press you on the Russia-Ukraine piece of this. I think there's more sympathy in Washington for the balancing act that India needs to play with China, just given the history and the geography. Russia, there's some sympathy for the history, but I think a little bit more frustration. How do you see that particular piece of it in the strategic autonomy context? I think a distinction needs to be made, something you said, Dan, in the past, that's of non-alignment, strategic autonomy, multi-alignment. I don't personally like to use the term multi-alignment because I think to get to Ashley's point, it gives the misleading impression that all of India's relationships are equal when they are practically not so.

38:43But I think each had a particular history. The context is sometimes muddied. So non-alignment had a very specific purpose in the early years, and I stress the early years of the Cold War. And it changed over time. I mean, for the second half of the Cold War, India was aligned with the Soviet Union. Strategic autonomy really came out in the context of the nuclear discussion in India and the realization that no country, not the United States, not the Soviet Union, was going to offer a nuclear deterrent to India. And therefore, India had to be strategically autonomous at that time. We can debate the terminology.

39:15But I think where there is more clarity is maybe what the nature of the U.S.-India relationship today. It is really an entente cordial, if you want to go back to a traditional way of thinking about a relationship. And in the pre-nuclear age, this was, in fact, a very common type of set of arrangements that, you know, they called it sometimes alliances or ententes. But this was really the nature of most close security and strategic partnerships at that time. And it was really only the nuclear age that required this sort of ironclad commitment that sort of characterized what we now think of as U.S.

39:46alliances with NATO, with Japan and others. On the Russia question, I think on China, there is no balancing act. India has, in some ways, more serious concerns about China than maybe the United States does, precisely because it's on the border. And that has, in fact, opened up this room for this U.S.-India partnership that we now talk about. I don't think it's often appreciated how deep the differences between India and China go. because it's not just about the disputed border, although that's the most important manifestation of it. But you have a trade deficit that is larger than India's entire defense spending.

40:18You have very intense competition between India and China in the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean region. You have questions about the broader balance of power and maritime security, China's relationship with Pakistan, and also on international order issues. It's China, not any other country that's blocking Indian aspirations at the United Nations Security Council, as a nuclear suppliers group. I think these differences are structural, they're well recognized, and that has actually opened up room for this cooperation. That has been appreciated by successive administrations in the United States.

40:50There are two relationships that sometimes rub Washington the wrong way, India's relationship with Russia and with Iran. And what I would stress with both these relationships, more with Iran, but to some degree with Russia, is that at least in material terms, they are diminishing in importance from India's point of view. Today in the Middle East, India's most important partners are the UAE, Israel, possibly Saudi Arabia. Whether it's from an energy standpoint, a people-to-people standpoint, a security standpoint, Iran is diminishing in relative importance for India. Will India push Iran away? No, but this is the reality of India's regional relationships.

41:26Similarly, with Russia, Prior to 2014, 85 % of India's defense imports were from Russia. Its space program was very closely tied to Russia, and Indian astronauts were training in Russia, not in the United States. Its nuclear program was much more close with Russia than with the U.S. That has all changed quite significantly. So the latest figures from CIPRI are that less than 35 % of India's defense imports are coming from Russia over the recent years. It was the United States that helped launch an Indian astronaut into space recently. The nuclear relationship is also on the cusp of changing quite significantly subject to Indian liability legislation.

42:01So it's not as if India is going to push Russia away because India has other concerns. It wants to retain the existing stock of its defense imports from Russia because its maintenance and state of readiness is intrinsically tied to that relationship with Russia. It's also concerned about the Russia-China relationship getting too close. And to the extent that India can offer alternatives, it's actually in the interest of many countries to ensure that India has a continuing line to Moscow. This, by the way, was of use even to the United States when there were nuclear threats being leveled by Moscow against Ukraine in 2022.

42:35India was one of the channels used by the United States to get its message across to Moscow. But again, if you look in material terms today, in purely material terms, India's relationship with the European Union is significantly more important. From trade, from an investment point of view, there's a trade negotiation underway, maybe concluded by the end of this year. even security today. So I think that it's worth sometimes just laying out these facts and explaining the context. And I find people tend to be quite understanding. They may not agree with India's point of view, but they certainly come away more appreciative of India's context.

43:10We'll be back after a short break.

43:16And now back to my conversation with Ashley Tellis, Neera Pomerau, and Dhruva Jaishankar. Ashley, I want to pick up on the third part of your argument, which is about illiberalism and the change in the domestic situation in India. You write, and I'm quoting you here, that the country is shedding one of its main sources of strength, its liberal democracy, by embracing Hindu nationalism. And you later say that an illiberal India is likely to be less powerful. Describe those changes and how you see them inhibiting India's rise on the global stage. So I think there are two dimensions to that challenge.

43:55One is ideational, the other is material. The ideational element is the influence that India had by being this exceptional republic. People don't often appreciate the fact that India was the first large democracy to provide all its citizens, irrespective of sex, caste, gender, instant universal suffrage. In the West, universal suffrage came through a long process of expanding individual rights. India did it in one go at the time that it became a republic. And this represents really a hopeful potent for the future, right? There's another dimension to this that I think is significant, that whereas in most countries, the survival of democracy is linked to the persistence of high per capita incomes, India has maintained its democracy despite being a developing country.

45:06And so from the point of view, if you believe that a liberal international order offers the best opportunity for the global system's peaceful evolution, because it creates opportunities for peaceful change, then India's departure from its liberal traditions, I think, ends up weakening that order. These are all ideational elements. The material element is simply that if you have to mobilize national power by utilizing every element of your citizenry, but you end up pursuing policies where substantial sections of your citizenry are treated as second-class citizens, then by definition, less coherent societies are not as effective as more coherent societies.

46:00And so from a purely material point of view, it worries me that as India has embarked on this trajectory of ascendancy, it sort of ties one leg to the stake of illiberalism and that prevents the kind of effectiveness that we could see, right? Now, someone can make the argument quite cogently that what are you talking about? India has become illiberal, but it has not had an impact on growth rates and so on and so forth. That may well be true. But we do know that India's internal security burdens are substantial. India's internal security burdens can potentially grow if you begin to deny the fruits of citizenship to all your inhabitants equal.

46:50It's a problem that China has in so many ways, where today it has an internal security budget that is bigger than its external defense budget. But except that when you are an economy five times larger than India's, you can bear those burdens much more flexibly than India can. So to the degree that Indian liberalism increases internal discontent, creates fractures within the polity that are otherwise avoidable, to that degree, illiberalism acts as a drag on India's progress. And so we are saying this as friends of India, right? Because at least at this moment, we are very aware of the toll that illiberalism is taking in our own country.

47:36So this is not an exercise in finger pointing. And I was very conscious in the piece to emphasize that the loss of both the United States and India to illiberal movements will have consequences because I believe that same argument is true for the United States, that if we cannot mobilize power because we are a polarized and divided polity, then it has an impact on our ability to maintain our unipolar standing in the world. So that is the essence of my argument on the liberal question. Now, there are many reasons why liberalism is intrinsically important to India because it provides the best constitutional framework for India to realize its best aspirations and so on and so forth.

48:22But those are advantages that the Indian people enjoy for themselves. And while we can be well-wishers of India on that count, we can't shape it. But the fact that India's turn could undermine the global liberal order and all the benefits it brings for our two countries, and the fact that it can impede political mobilization and power mobilization, those are the elements that I hung my argument on in the piece. In response to what Ashley has to say, I mean, he's raised some very searching questions on highlighting certain tensions within India's domestic political trajectory. But to my mind, there may be such internal contradictions, but you have to understand that India is in the midst of a civilizational transition.

49:17We are seeking to balance tradition with modernity, pluralism and nationalism, which is a very rising tide both in your country and mine, liberalism and majoritarianism. Now, these are real contradictions, but to my mind, they're not disqualifying. It doesn't validate any democratic regression. I agree with that. But it helps explain that there is a flux that characterizes India's domestic and international identity today. Dhruva, anything you would add? I do think sometimes in reading assessments of India's domestic policy from outside, I notice a few things. One is sometimes the starting context for a lot of discussion about Indian democracy is very different.

50:07There is an imposition sometimes of the US or European lens. And I often stress that, you know, the First Amendment of the Indian Constitution is not the same as the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. In fact, it's almost the opposite. That Indian notions of liberalism are very different from, say, a French notion of laicite, which is, you know, a very different definition of the relationship between religion and the state. I also think that other things are overlooked. The strength of grassroots democracy, the panchayat system in India, for example, not something a lot of people are aware of.

50:38Many would be surprised that opposition parties in India until recently governed states that were home to six largest cities in India. Some of this needs to be taken into account when assessing the future. But one more thing, I mean, there's actually been, Devish Kapoor and others have done work on this, but there's actually been a decline in violent religious riots, for example, not just religious, but communal riots over the past few decades. So, again, I do think sometimes the reality is much more complex, and these are some things that people need to take into account. I want to say, I mean, to our friends in the U.S., that India is neither a post-colonial pluralist utopia, but neither is it a hardened ethno-nationalist state.

51:21It is undergoing a civilizational redefinition, the forces of globalization, post-colonial assertiveness, religious and cultural revivalism, and economic aspiration. So we're really in a state of transformation, but we are not a democracy in denial. We are a democracy in transition. Druva, let me stick with you on one other difference that you have from Ashley. Ashley's view is that Trump's skepticism of alliances and questioning of some key pieces of America's global role is temporary and aberrational. You argue in your response to his essay that Ashley is focused on a world that is vanishing, not because of anything India is doing, but more because of what the United States is doing.

52:05Do you think there's risk to betting on the United States from India's perspective, just given the instability in U.S. policy? I mean, how does the volatility in U.S. politics play into Indian strategic considerations here? You know, one of the challenges for all of us who are analysts in the Trump era is distinguishing between the signal and the noise. During the first Trump term, it was interesting to observe in real time what were policies that were likely to survive and what were policies that were likely to change with a new presidency and a few executive orders being signed. And I think we're still in the midst of that right now.

52:39Things that are enshrined in U.S. law, legislation tends to be more difficult for a future administration to change. That being said, I think there have been a few trends that have continued, I would argue, since late Obama years and have changed mostly by virtue of the tone and perhaps severity of the policies that followed. So one, the U.S. has been keen on burden sharing. It's something that under both Obama and Biden, the United States asked of its NATO allies, we would like to see greater burden sharing on your part. Trump says it in a much harsher way, but I think that that's been pretty consistent.

53:13Two, some degree of skepticism of multilateral institutions. Again, the Biden administration took a more reformist approach to it, but there is that skepticism that the institutions of today are out of date. Three, a skepticism of trade. The U.S. is no longer going to enter into trade agreements with anyone that involve the U.S. not increasing access to its market in a non-reciprocal manner. And I think, again, these are areas where there's been some consistency. Now, all of this suggests, bringing it back to the question of multipolarity, that the US and China, while in material terms, and Ashley is correct in this, may over the next decade, and it's hard to project beyond a decade, may be in a league of their own.

53:54They will both be constrained in their own ways. And just again, to use Ashley's own argument, China will certainly and has been constrained by the nature of its government. There have been moments in the past few years where China has not stepped up to its plate in a way that you would expect a country with its material capabilities to have done so, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. But there have been many cases after that as well, where China has been somewhat missing in action. For the United States, it's more a question of choice rather than capability. I point this out in my response to Ashley, that it's quite remarkable that the U.S.

54:25retains about 26, 25, 26 percent of the world's GDP today, which is the same proportion as in 1991, 1992. So the U.S. is an enormously resilient power, but the question is less one of capabilities and more one of a will. And will the United States going forward, even after Trump, be willing to enter into the kinds of arrangements that it did during the Cold War, and it was motivated again by this existential competition with the Soviet Union in doing so? Will that continue? The answer, I think, is, and we've seen evidence of this, is India to continue to invest in that relationship with the U.S.

55:02Prime Minister Modi made a very early visit in February of this year to meet with Trump to kind of iron out this new relationship with the new administration. So it's to continue to invest in that, but in fact, hedge against the possibility of a more retrenched United States as well. And that means investing in relations with other partners, including many of them, U.S. allies. And you're seeing that, I was just in South Korea, but you're seeing a lot more interest in investing in the relationship with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Europe, the Middle East. Not that these will be a single replacement for the United States.

55:34It's going to be very hard to do that. But this is all a hedge against the possibility, which is not an entirely unfounded possibility of a much more retrenched United States. There have been some commentators who have looked at the recent fighting between India and Pakistan and the U.S. response to it as some kind of betrayal by the United States or a response that was overly sympathetic to Pakistan. How do you read the outcome of that war in the U.S. role? Initially, the U.S. was actually quite supportive of India, including its right to retaliate against Pakistan. I think India was caught off guard for reasons that I can only partially explain on Trump's announcement on May 10th, taking credit for a ceasefire between the two countries and his role in that and why he did that.

56:20I think two things that were also somewhat surprising. One was Secretary of State Marco Rubio's tweet saying that India and Pakistan agreed to wide-ranging talks in a neutral third country, something India says they did not agree to, and also subsequently the visit by Pakistan's army chief to Washington and the seeming consolidation of that mill-to-mill relationship. Now, I think a few things need to be kept in mind. I think, again, in material terms, coming back to that, the U.S. doesn't offer the same level of assistance nor is it dependent on Pakistan to the same degree as it was prior to the U.S.

56:51withdrawal from Afghanistan before. And again, just the economic constraints that Pakistan is under, and not to mention the Pakistan-China relationship, which remains considerable and deep and, again, quite consequential from a military technological point of view. I think that there will be limits to where that relationship will go. But this is not to discount that it has depreciated the appetite in India for a closer relationship with the United States. Things that would, I think, have been easier to convince people of in New Delhi have become harder. Now, the question that remains, and this is still an open question because it depends on steps taken by Washington and to some degree India over the next few months, is, is this a bump in the road or is this a deviation?

57:32I still sense at the present moment it is a bump in the road. Again, trade talks have continued subsequent to that. The Quad has met after that. Other, the sort of normal interactions have continued. And I think another question needs to be raised, which is how much is this really a difference between India and the United States? And how much of this is a difference between Prime Minister Modi and President Trump? How much is this personal versus a sub-structural question? The trick, I think, for India going forward is how to get across India's dissatisfaction without doing anything that would harm Indian interests.

58:04Because there's nothing Pakistan would like more than for India to, in a peak of fury, cancel some contracts with the United States, right? So how not to play into Pakistan's hands, because they're obviously exploiting certain conditions to create this division between Washington and New Delhi. So I do think it's a level-headed assessment, but I wouldn't discount the fact that there's been a vibe shift in U.S.-India relations. Neera Palma, if you were back in your old job as India's ambassador to Washington, what case would you be making to your American counterparts about changes you'd like to see in America's approach to India and perhaps understanding of India's approach that you think are lacking in Washington today?

58:45I'd like to address the questions of perception and to be able to tell my American interlocutors in as persuasive a way that I can that strategic alignment and strategic autonomy are not mutually exclusive. That's the first point. The second point I'd like to make to my American interlocutors is that we have shared interests. Nobody is disputing that, and least of all India. India looks at this relationship very seriously as a partnership of purpose, really, of very strongly defined purpose, which helps both our countries, but it cannot be an alliance of obligations. I mean, the U.S. cannot be a demanding partner.

59:29I think there is a sensitivity within India about that. There is a history to this. So perhaps we should keep in mind the question of memory, which is always important when you define a relationship. We want this relationship to move forward. There are so many areas. The table is really groaning under the weight of all the good things that are happening in this relationship. So let us partake of this bounty for mutual benefit. Ashley, if you were once again an American diplomat in New Delhi, how would you make the case for a closer alignment with the United States? How would you make the case for the kinds of policies you would like to see?

1:00:07And what would be in the near term some steps that you think India could take in this direction? So I think the foundations of the argument that we started making in 2002 in the face of the distraction of our own government because of NIDL. I think the foundations of that argument still are intact, that the case for seeing greater Indian power and greater Indian prominence in the Indo-Pacific, because it serves America's interests first and India's interests along the way. I don't think there is a repudiation of that claim that is justified. Because to my mind, if anything, the case has become more compelling because in the face of the reality of US-China competition, and remember in 2002, they still had very amicable relations with China.

1:01:06And President Bush in particular was very hopeful that we could preserve a balance of power in Asia, as Condi Rice said, that favors freedom, not simply to prevent Chinese misuse of its power. People focus on that aspect, but equally because it created the preconditions for continued cooperation. If China could not misuse its power, it had all the incentives to continue with peaceful cooperation. That has become even more important. And that's where India fits into this U.S. strategy of building up its strength and so on and so forth. But what I think has changed is because the realities of competition with China now bear on both of us, we need to move beyond strategies of hedging.

1:01:51We need to move in the direction of building a partnership that can deliver in the context of a crisis, in the context of deterrence, and if worse comes to worst in the context of a conflict. And what troubles me a little is that the Indian desire to still hedge, despite the changes in its environment, are not allowing the bilateral relationship to realize full fruit. I take Nirupama's point that India, like the United States, wants to avoid entangling engagements. But the U.S. had the luxury of avoiding entangling engagements because we were the most powerful entity in the Northern Hemisphere even at that point.

1:02:43We would become even more powerful in time. And we had no enemies in close proximity. India does not have that luxury. And because we have a forward position in Asia and allies that we have to defend by treaty, we don't have that luxury. So we really need to make this partnership more difficult. So I would come back to things that I mentioned in passing earlier on, which is we have to make the defense relationship much more productive. It cannot be simply endless conversations among leaders and occasional purchase and occasional exercise. I think we need to put in place institutional structures by which we can support each other.

1:03:32I'll give you a simple example. We have an agreement with India now to repair U.S. warships and Indian ports. It's something that I advocated inside the government for a long time. And when Admiral Michael Gilday was the CNO, he brought it to completion. But it's not obvious to me. that that agreement, for example, would hold in times of conflict. It's not obvious to me that India might not see that agreement as provocative, even if it was not involved in the conflict, as providing a form of material support to the United States when it's abroad. I would like to overcome humps of this kind. And there are so many other areas where, you know, if time permitted, we could go into granular detail.

1:04:21The economy. I mean, the character of U.S.-India economic relations, for all the gains made, we are simply not at a level that we should be for countries of our aggregate economic size. It's really unfortunate that we are at this moment today where we have two political parties in the United States, both anti-trade. And even though India has moved in the direction of signing so-called free trade agreements, they are Swiss cheese agreements. They're not real free trade agreements. And we are going to get an agreement with India in the next few weeks if we are lucky. And Trump gets around to signing what has been on his desk now for close to four weeks.

1:05:05But even that is not going to stimulate US-India trade to the level that it should be. So I would say at least in those two areas to start off, right, we need to build foundations for a much deeper partnership. See, the disagreement that we are having here, I think, is a disagreement that manifests itself around three dimensions. The first is, I see the threats posed by China as being so serious, and India's capacity to respond being sufficiently stymied that it cannot afford to essentially diversify at the expense of building a privileged relationship with the United States. The second dimension is the character of the alignments that we would like to forge and what its implications are for India's freedom of action.

1:05:56I think we need to be realistic here. This is international politics. No one's doing favors for others without getting something in return. India can pursue multi-alignment. India can pursue relations with other states. But I can't see how it can maintain a productive relationship with the U.S. if some of those relationships undercut core American objectives. And that will require what, in IR theory, we used to call an exchange of considerations, right? We have to do much better there. And I think the third area where we have a disagreement is whether we can build something despite the transformations in our own societies.

1:06:46And I think Nirupama is suggesting that we might be able to pull that off because these are larger macro level shifts that are taking place in India and possibly the U.S. she may be right. I hope she's right. But I worry that they will actually impede our ability to build the partnership we wanted. And at the end of the day, to my mind, if the US and India cannot hang together in protecting liberalism globally, we both come out weaker than we should be. Ashley, thank you for writing the original piece. Neerah Palma, Dhruva, thank you both for the thoughtful and incisive responses. And thanks to all three of you for joining me today.

1:07:33Your debate can be read in our forthcoming issue. It's online right now. So I encourage everyone to go read in more detail what we've been talking about today. Thanks so much.

1:07:47The Foreign Affairs interview is produced by Konish Thoreau, Molly McEnany, Ben Metzner, Caroline Wilcox, and Ashley Wood with audio help from Todd Yeager and Marcus Zacharia. our theme music was written and performed by Robin Hilton special thanks as well to Arena Hogan make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and if you like what you've heard please take a minute to rate and review it we release a new show every Thursday thanks again for tuning in

1:08:27Thank you.