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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I mean troop commitment. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.