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Comment by local_crmdgeon | Hacker News Reader

That the US and India aren't each other's closest ally confuses me. It's the 2 biggest democracies, both are on uneasy terms with China, there's an enormous Desi diaspora here. Both are heavy into high-tech with struggling manufacturing bases. Both have a history of trouble with Islamic terrorism, both ardent allies of Israel. Each is the largest country in their region.

Hell, we speak the same language (kinda, I know it's a lingua franca etc)! So why are we allies with Pakistan, a country that openly hates us, instead of India?

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> the US and India aren't each other's closest ally confuses me

We increasingly are.

> why are we allies with Pakistan, a country that openly hates us, instead of India?

India openly allied with the Soviets, so we took the other side. Also, India was an immature democracy through the 70s, when it flirted with outright authoritarianism. It isn’t until recently that it has become a middle-income democracy with a high-income upper-middle class and cosmopolitan elite.

> India openly allied with the Soviets, so we took the other side.

I’m afraid you have it backwards. India and the Soviet Union signed a treaty only after the US sent its seventh fleet towards India during the 1971 India-Pakistan conflict. US supported Pakistan in the war and India had no choice but to align with the Soviets to deter them.

> India and the Soviet Union signed a treaty only after the US sent its seventh fleet towards India during the 1971 India-Pakistan conflict

New Delhi and Moscow were transferring technology in “steel, defense, railways, construction equipment, metal & mining [and] petrochemicals” by the time “Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union supported India's stance on the Kashmir conflict against Pakistan and over Portuguese coastal enclaves such as Goa” in 1955 [1]. The MiG-21 was co-produced in India in the 1960s.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–Soviet_Union_relations...

Technology transfer and verbal support is nothing like coming to a country’s rescue during a war. An official treaty was only signed during the events of 1971 war. US-Pakistan mutual defense treaty dates back to 1954.

> Technology transfer and verbal support is nothing like coming to a country’s rescue during a war

Co-producing warplanes is as good as a treaty. Right in front of leaders visiting each others’ capitals.

Bottom line is India never courted the West. Pakistan did. Neither drove the other into anyone’s arms; American relations in Pakistan were focussed on the Middle East, India’s in the Soviets with China. When the theatre shifted to India v Pakistan, the table was already set and everyone assumed their places.

> Co-producing warplanes is as good as a treaty.

Not really, no. One is a financial commitment, the other is a military commitment. They're very different.

India never courted the West because Pakistan already had close relations with them. The order matters since your argument is US aligned with Pakistan only because India aligned with Soviet Union. US had its own motivations (obviously) around curtailing Soviet influence in Afghanistan.

> One is a financial commitment, the other is a military commitment. They're very different.

The U.S. co-producing nuclear submarines with Australia isn’t a military commitment?

> your argument is US aligned with Pakistan only because India aligned with Soviet Union

This was never said? We didn’t ally with India because it was allied with the Soviets. We have no problem allying with both sides of a regional spat e.g. Israel & Saudi Arabia, Turkey & Greece and Japan & Korea.

> The U.S. co-producing nuclear submarines with Australia isn’t a military commitment?

I mean troop commitment. Will the US send a naval fleet to Australia if the latter is attacked?

> Will the US send a naval fleet to Australia if the latter is attacked?

You’re kidding, right? Of course we would. (Unless it’s chickenshit business, like Indonesia and Oz getting into a coast guard squabble over migrant boats.)

When you co-produce weapons, you send high-ranking technical advisors and expensive kit that needs guarding. This is why e.g. deploying a ballistic missile radar isn’t just plopping down a radar. It involves deploying troops around it. We have defence treaties with countries whom we don’t trust enough to co-produce with. Co-production is a big deal.

I'm not kidding. But you're talking about something different.

India and Soviet Union had a different kind of co-production deal. It has always been, even to this day with Russia, technology transfer and licensing i.e. you help develop systems and then fully hand over to India. No troop deployment, you're only in it for the money. The BrahMos missile development is the best example of this.

> even to this day with Russia, technology transfer i.e. you help develop systems and then fully hand over to India

No troops, but certainly Russians. When the “help develop systems” part is in effect, you’re as good as allies.

There are more broken defence treaties than cases of military technology coöperation betrayals. That is why those deals are so closely scrutinised. Treaties promise something in the future. Co-production delivers something today.

Maybe there was foreign policy naïveté in New Delhi at the time. I don’t think so, but perhaps. On the Soviet side, they certainly knew what they were doing.

> When the “help develop systems” part is in effect, you’re as good as allies.

Sure, I agree with that. But there are different degrees of being allies. "Help develop systems" is nowhere near "risk your own troops to defend another country" (a.k.a. NATO). That's the distinction I'm trying to make.

Agree. But the meaningful part of NATO isn’t the paper, it’s the deployments. Same for the ‘54 pact with Pakistan. If someone attacked Pakistani military installations, there was a good chance of taking out an American. That’s the deterrence.

The Soviets didn’t put boots on the ground, so a similar risk wasn’t present. But one, that wasn’t knowable at the time. And two, there absolutely would have been Russian assets in the vicinity while everyone was learning how to do their jobs.

Well, NATO conditions on paper are what kicked in post 9/11 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most NATO countries risked their troops because the US was attacked, even though their own military installations/deployments were never attacked.

True. I shouldn't say that the paper is worthless. But between a piece of paper and materiel, there are very few cases were a country would choose the former.

Just direct the other guy to the declassified Telegrams of Nixon administration instead of trying to infer all this unnecessary tertiary stuff.

> India never courted the West. Pakistan did

India and the US did court each other til the mid-1960s. IIT Kharagpur was built by UIUC and IIT Kanpur by UC Berkeley, along with JK Galbraith's strong lobbying for Indians rule industrialization in "Economic Development" and "The New Industrial State".

After JFK and Nehru died, the relationship tanked. Indira Gandhi leaned pro-Socialist economically with the 1969-73 nationalization drive that impacted American businesses, and LBJ and Nixon both detested Indira at a personal level (though to be fair the feeling was mutual). India supported the North Vietnamese during the war [0] and also began military tech transfers with the USSR and France during that time period [1] due to their mutual "Non Aligned" policy.

There was an actual chance that India would have become a global factory, but the nationalization drive in the 70s and 80s [2] lead to American enterprises in India shifting to newly open China

[0] - https://academic.oup.com/book/32264/chapter-abstract/2684597...

[1] - https://academic.oup.com/book/10629/chapter-abstract/1586347...

[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/12/archives/reaction-is-mixe...

Please read the declassified telegram of Nixon administration and his own views on the conflict.

This is the usual American lack of any historical knowledge concerning their own actions on display.

US took Pakistan's side first, we only made the Indo-Soviet friendship deal in 71 because we had no other choice, or just accept being obliterated by US Navy while intervening in Bangladesh. We were one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned movement of third world countries and one of the leaders of that group. We did not want to be involved in cold war between the west and USSR and took no sides until we were forced to for survival.

Can you imagine that? The world's strongest and second-strongest democracies aiming their guns at the world's largest on behalf of an Islamist-Military dictatorship that was committing a genocide.

As usual, Americans forget all of this or don't even bother to read about it in the first place.

This is a weaker version of someone else’s argument [1]. Read that thread, because they argue your point better than you do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38380982

That doesn't say anything about how ignorant you are. Read my comment again.

Sorry, but I suggest you educate yourself on the correct timeline of events. Also, kindly read Nixon's declassified statements and the 1971 tapes. The kind of racist bigotry he regularly espoused would break several HN guidelines - so I cannot post his statements here - please look them up online. He had an unnerving, extremely rabid, irrational hate-on for Indian people.

The relationship with Pakistan is mostly historical as it provided access to Afghanistan and acted to counter Soviet/Russian influence in the region. India, although officially neutral, was in practice a semi-ally of the USSR and then Russia for a mix of ideological and economic reasons. But those relationships are likely to reverse over the next few years for the reasons you suggest. Pakistan no longer has anything of value to offer to the USA; their only card to play is threatening to form an alliance with China.

Modi, for all his faults, has made a huge pivot towards America like no other PM before him. India and US are closer than ever before, even in the backdrop of India’s neutrality stance in Russia-Ukraine conflict. There are multiple defense agreements between the countries, including intelligence sharing, at levels we have not seen before.

But India hates playing the second fiddle, so they don’t want be a traditional “ally” that the US can push around at will. They want to be more like “partners”.

Natural allies really. But it's not all good though, there's been a hard and strangely growing anti-western sentiment for a while now. It's big enough to become a problem in the near future.

Also, western governments pay very little attention to understanding India, it's all colonial era stereotypes for the most part. Even the largest and most well known newspapers rarely send anyone with a deep understanding of the country to cover it, and they give a very shallow lopsided, uni-dimensional impressions of the country to their audience.

Until relatively recently, the population of the USA considered running a country as a religious ethno-state to be a bad thing.

Because the US got in bed with China because China was opposed to the Russians.

It's also why the US was down with Cambodia (they, together with China opposed Vietnam, who the US opposed because it decided to intervene in the losing side of a failed French colonial conflict.)

India follows a policy of neutrality and the us wants a country in the region who will allow it to have a military presence.

Pakistan is okay with giving up sovereignty of American military bases. India is not. Thus the US nominally allies with Pakistan and India steers clear because of that.

Although as others have said, India clearly favors the US these days

The US doesn't have any military bases in Pakistan...

During the War on Terror, Ameria did operate at Pakistani military facilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan%E2%80%93United_States...

India is just too big to be obedient client state. US have no allies.

> India is just too big

Only in population, which is irrelevant, since nobody is contemplating a land war. Economically [1] and militarily [2], America has bigger allies.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...

[2] https://power.lowyinstitute.org/data/military-capability/sig...

New World Order is a paradigm where US runs the show for everyone else. The world’s largest democracy is a threat to this. One of the worlds largest economies is also a viable economic opportunity. + Military / Geopolitics. These are all factors in play at the same time

How would EU be different? It is not a country but as an economy it has similar population as the US, geographical proximity to asia and africa and many well established economic powerhouses. If the US should feel threatned it would be by the EU.

The reason the US does not like China is not because of their economy but their politics and military ambitions. Both China and India have nukes so they can defend their territory against the US just fine. China wants to expand into taiwan, the south china see and even some west china territory India controls and who knows what else.

If you think about it, being wealtheir than the US does not affect the US much so long as the US is still a competing consumer economy and the dollar is the global currency (kind of like english being lingua franca, unless the world trusts China more than the US to pay its bills, RMB will never displace the dollar ) what changes for the US? So long as GDP is the same and the US does not rely on exports for survival it can still maintain the most powerful military. The problem is with China using their wealth to compete with the US military similar to USSR which might lead to a world war 3 situation.

India on the other hand, no doubt will improve its military but I don't see India spending 100B+ a year on military or foreign bases and multiple aircraft carrier strike force groups and all that. The only real conflict opportunity for India are pakistan and China but if India is allied with the US then the US and NATO countries will be a deterrent. Much of why India is neutral on ukraine and won't publicly be closer to the US is a result of economic dependencies such as oil and trade routes. A prosperous india might be able to break free from those shackles and equally compete with EU and the US as well as with China.

> If the US should feel threatned it would be by the EU.

The EU is a society that is winding down.

Americans are sensible and realize the future of innovation and progress lies in countries that have young people.

A bunch of old Europeans are not a threat. Europe is utterly feckless anyway and is unlikely to ever be able to field a large enough army to actually be a threat

Most of the EU is NATO, so no idea what you are talking about.

I haven't seen it put this way - food for thought.

Reminds me of that attempted mass murder at yet another Winter Festival in France - doesn't make any sense that this would happen again and again by Islamists from a US perspective, but from a "fuck it, we're just giving up" perspective it makes perfect sense.

> Europe is utterly feckless anyway and is unlikely to ever be able to field a large enough army to actually be a threat

In a list of American geopolitical concerns, a traditional force on force land invasion wouldn't even make it into the top 100. Swap out "Europe" for any other political entity real or imagined and it would make no difference.

EU is part of Nato. US gave protection to EU if they protect US against it’s enemies. It all has to do with war. With NATO US can bully anyone and EU can feel protected. All wars are for power. All wars consist of alliances between nations. That is the new world order. Not some /r/conspiracy bs but straight military power and nukes. US plays games with countries to get best outcome as it a nations goals. Right now India will not bend the knee as Modi won’t sell out the country and give in to US. US is playing long game by being friendly with both China and India. China wants territory India has as per all the border skirmishes going on as per the 5 fingers of Mao. Instead of US telling China fuck off they play both sides in hopes of leveraging a situation to get military alliance. Through military alliance they can get the best economic deals, use the country up, and move on to next while adding another powerful ally to their list. You are doing too much analysis and not understanding the mechanisms of power which is simply military strategy and alliances. It is about who your friends are.

> New World Order is a paradigm where US runs the show for everyone else

Have you watched our politics? We don’t want to run shit. Running shit is expensive.

Also, America did run the show. Twice. After WWII, when it held a global nuclear hegemony. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it was the sole superpower. Both times we basically did everything we could to slough off the responsibility.

US doesn’t want to run the world and control other countries? This is an incredibly immature understanding of geopolitics. Do you understand what NATO is? Do you understand how many military bases the US has. Do you understand the involvement of the US in wars outside its own country. Do you understand the political and military powerhouse the US is. Do you not understand these goals have been accomplished with only Russia and China pushing back? US has formed a strategic alliance with every powerhouse except Russia. What US wants occurs. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with spheres of influence. I can’t believe I am downvoted for voicing my opinion by uneducated techies who do not understand global politics. This website becomes more like Reddit every week. Why am I downvoted for providing my opinion?

> US doesn’t want to run the world and control other countries?

Of course we want more influence. But we don't want to run things.

It's not because we're nice people or whatever. It's because we're a maritime and trade power while our competitors have historically been land powers. We want someone rich we can trade with who takes care of their own problems at home.

> Do you not understand these goals have been accomplished with only Russia and China pushing back?

A lot of the world is constantly pushing back against all kinds of hegemony. To add to your list, there is no love lost for America in Brazil, much of Africa, most of the Arab world nor in Central Asia.

> What US wants occurs

Have you seen how discordant our alliance talks are? They're multilateral and messy. The only reason Europe and America are in step with one another is because of Russia. The only reason the Quad exists is because of China.

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