India is key to rescuing Joe Biden’s troubled foreign policy legacy

History will likely remember President Joe Biden for his disastrous military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which helped make the Taliban great again, and for involving the U.S. deeply in the Ukraine war, only to see Russia incrementally expand its territorial gains.

But his most troubling legacy, which threatens to unravel America’s global preeminence, has been to drive China and Russia, historical rivals, into a de facto strategic alliance. This unholy partnership is the result of Biden’s failure to play China against Russia, despite investing in personal diplomacy with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing had long been at the heart of American grand strategy. It helped the U.S. win the Cold War, not militarily, but geopolitically. By co-opting China from the 1970s onward in an informal alliance geared toward containing and rolling back Soviet influence and power, the U.S. established a two-against-one competition that contributed to the Soviet Union’s imperial overstretch and, ultimately, to the West’s triumph in the Cold War without direct armed conflict.

But now the U.S. has become the bridge that unites China and Russia. Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin portray America as an aggressive hegemon with a Cold War mindset. They share a vision to reshape the world by ending the era of Western dominance. Putin and Xi also seem to be providing cover to each other’s expansionism.

Simply put, a two-against-one geopolitical contest is returning, but with America on the receiving end. Consequently, an overextended U.S. seriously risks accelerating its relative decline through strategic overreach.

The Sino-Russian entente has raised the strategic imperative for America to forge an informal alliance with another nuclear-armed giant: India.

India’s decades-old rivalry with Beijing goes back to China’s 1951 annexation of the buffer Tibet and the resultant Sino-Indian border war of 1962. In more recent years, China and India have been locked in a tense military standoff along their long Himalayan frontier.

India, now the world’s fastest-growing major economy, has a huge market that has become increasingly important for American exporters given China’s sputtering economic-growth engine and deepening demographic crisis. The U.S. needs India as an economic and geopolitical ally, especially if it is to avert strategic overstretch and prevail in its sharpening rivalries with China and Russia.

This explains why there is bipartisan support in Washington for closer ties with India. Indeed, successive presidents since Bill Clinton cultivated closer ties with New Delhi, with every administration leaving the relationship in stronger shape than what it inherited.

However, under Biden, the relationship between the world’s two most populous democracies has come under increasing strain, leading to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent meeting with Xi. The meeting, coinciding with an India-China agreement on border patrolling to ease their military standoff, has signaled a thaw in the icy hostility marking relations between the Asian giants.

The U.S.-India strategic partnership holds the key to counterbalancing China’s hegemonic ambitions and maintaining the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s emerging economic and geopolitical hub. So, by impelling India to seek a thaw with Beijing as a hedge against American unpredictability, Biden has compounded his blunder in helping to build a Sino-Russian axis.

Tensions with New Delhi have arisen over a series of issues, starting with Biden’s surrender of Afghanistan to a Pakistan-reared terrorist militia. Tensions grew with India’s neutral stance on the Ukraine war. In an ungainly attempt to bully New Delhi into submission, the White House in 2022 threatened that “the costs and consequences” for India would be “significant and long-term” if it refused to take sides in Ukraine.

The Biden administration’s hectoring tone has struck a raw nerve in India, including when it recently demanded that it “won’t be fully satisfied until there is meaningful accountability” from New Delhi over what the U.S. alleges was a failed 2023 plot to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a New York-based Sikh separatist who is on India’s most wanted list. But the U.S. has taken no action against Pannun for making terrorist threats against India, including warning passengers not to fly Air India between Nov. 1 and 19 — a notice that has coincided with a spate of hoax bomb threats against Indian carriers that have disrupted air travel.

In fact, the increasing role of terrorism-glorifying Sikh separatists based in the U.S. and Canada is reopening old Indian wounds from the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight that two separate Canadian inquiries found was the handiwork of Canadian Sikh terrorists. The mid-Atlantic bombing killed all 329 people on board.

But at the root of U.S.-India tensions are American policies in South Asia that New Delhi sees as detrimental to its core interests. The Biden administration has been coddling military-backed governments in Pakistan and Bangladesh (where a recent U.S.-supported regime change was seen by many in India as a “color revolution”), while seeking to overthrow Myanmar’s military junta, including through stringent sanctions and “nonlethal” military aid to rebels, despite the spillover effects on Indian border regions.

Restoring mutual respect and trust in the relationship with India, which Biden has acknowledged is “among the most consequential in the world,” should be a priority for the next American administration. Fortuitously, there will be an India connection either way — whether the U.S. elects its first Indian American president in Kamala Harris or its first Indian American second lady in Usha Vance, wife of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

No less pressing is the imperative for the next president to forestall a formal China-Russia alliance, including by taking advantage of the historical Sino-Russian mistrust to play one against the other. If Beijing and Moscow cement a military and strategic alliance against America, Washington’s worst geopolitical nightmare would come true.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”