/ world today news/ True to its tradition of non-alignment, India has refused to join the US-led effort to keep open sea lanes in the Red Sea, where Houthi rebels have been indiscriminately hitting commercial traffic with drones and anti-ship missiles.
At the same time, however, New Delhi has sent warships to the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden to protect Indian-flagged merchantmen, while assisting ships of all flags that have been damaged by Houthi strikes. Ten warships of the Indian Navy now patrol the waters west of the subcontinent.
This is the way it should be. Freedom of the seas is a common trust of all maritime nations. All trading nations must guard it, lest the salt water be filled with anarchy, with all the commercial and consequently economic chaos that maritime lawlessness would cause.
It is appropriate for India to act as the guardian of maritime security in the Indian Ocean, where it is seen, not implausibly, as a benevolent hegemon.
There are many strands to the notion of India itself, but an important one stems not from the venerable history of this civilization-state, but from the diplomatic history of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In 1961, founding Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru appeared before Parliament to make the case for the expulsion of Portugal from its coastal enclave of Goa, a remnant of the Portuguese Empire located on the subcontinent since the sixteenth century.
Nehru does not refer to India’s great past or to any famous Indian thinker like the ancient philosopher Kautilya.
He based his appeal on the Monroe Doctrine (1823).
And he took President James Monroe’s logic to a degree that would have puzzled Monroe, creating an Indian Monroe Doctrine to govern New Delhi’s conduct in diplomacy and military affairs after independence from the British Empire.
Monroe simply forbade European empires from reclaiming the American colonies lost in a series of revolutions. Contrary to popular belief, he did not vow to drive Europeans out of the Western Hemisphere entirely.
This was not crusading doctrine. He simply wanted to freeze the status quo, pleasing to the United States as well as the newly independent Latin American republics.
Hands down, Europe.
Nehru went much further than Monroe, stating not only that India should expel Portugal from the subcontinent, but that “any attempt by a foreign power to interfere in any way with India is something which India cannot tolerate and which, according to her strength, she will oppose. This is the broad doctrine I set forth” (italics mine).
Strong words, but appropriate. When they lay down rules of conduct, practitioners of public administration tend to formulate them in general and somewhat vague terms, so as not to commit themselves or their successors to any particular course of action that might conflict with the national interests or goals of the day.
Thus freed, they can interpret and reinterpret doctrine according to circumstances and national needs. Nehru set an enduring pattern for Indian foreign policy.
How will current and future leaders apply Nehru’s broad doctrine? Look back to look forward. To look through a dark glass into India’s future, we can look to America’s past.
The Monroe Doctrine underwent at least three phases as domestic and geopolitical circumstances metamorphosed around the United States. From the 1820s to the 1890s, the Republic was concerned with maritime security provided by former enemy Great Britain and its Royal Navy.
Britain saw its own interest in preventing rival empires from returning to the Western Hemisphere and had a navy capable of blocking access. Interests converged in favor of the US.
British efforts created a safe space for the United States to fight its North-South feuds, undergo an industrial revolution, and expand to the Pacific coast, all without the trouble and expense of maintaining a large standing army.
Free-riding US-provided maritime security is one potential future for India’s Monroe Doctrine, and indeed New Delhi could have adhered to a free-riding policy in the Indian Ocean for decades after Nehru promulgated his doctrine.
This soft, gentle approach remained in place until recent years, when an aggressive outside power, China, began encroaching on the Indian Ocean and US naval superiority seemed headed for decline. India needed independent opportunities.
The free movement of an uncertain benefactor seems less and less acceptable in Indian eyes.
Back to America. By 1890, the national project of the United States was largely complete, and the republic began to perceive its station as a prominent regional naval power.
The US Navy assembled its first steam-powered, armored, and large-gun battle fleet. Naval power gave American statesmen options beyond dependence on the Royal Navy, whose supremacy was under strain with the rise of Imperial Germany, a rival that maintained its own naval ambitions.
In fact, in 1895, the Grover Cleveland administration injected itself into a dispute between Great Britain, then ruler of colonial Guiana, and neighboring Venezuela.
It appears that the two contenders may go to war for control of resource-rich territory along their common border, and that Britain may seize land from Venezuela – violating the Monroe Doctrine’s prohibition against European territorial expansion in the Americas.
So noble was Washington’s behavior during the Venezuelan border dispute that Richard Olney, Cleveland’s secretary of state, declared that the United States was “virtually sovereign” in the entire hemisphere. It was a statement of breathtaking scope.
After all, a sovereign power holds a monopoly on power within map lines called boundaries. In Olney’s view, the Republic had the right to have its way in any dispute that affected its interests, and it now had the naval power to outmaneuver any extra-regional power bold enough to oppose its will.
London agreed to Washington’s request to act as a mediator in the dispute, and in effect the United States anointed itself America’s regional strongman.
Similarly, India may seek to become a powerhouse as US naval power wanes, China makes military incursions into the Indian Ocean region, and India’s economy provides the means to finance a large navy.
Depending on how you count, the Indian Navy already consists of about 140 vessels, including a pair of active aircraft carriers, and that number will only grow in the coming years. Like America in Cleveland, India increasingly boasts of armed force to assert itself in regional diplomacy.
Like fin de siècle America, I may have to throw my weight around.
In 1904, the Monroe Doctrine entered its third phase under the tutelage of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt actually softened the doctrine, distancing himself from the bombast of Olney and Cleveland. In his 1904 message to Congress,
Theodore Roosevelt claimed an “international police power” designed to protect Latin American territory from falling into the hands of European navies, which might build naval bases there to block or even block the sea lanes leading to and from Panama Canal once this waterway became operational.
Forcible international debt collection hastened Roosevelt’s 1904 “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Unstable Caribbean governments had a habit of defaulting on their debts to European banks.
When this happened, the usual practice was for a European government in default to send a fleet to confiscate the defaulting country’s customs and use the proceeds of overseas trade to pay off the bankers.
Roosevelt did not object to forcing sovereign nations to repay debts they freely assumed, but he worried about the potential for violating the Monroe Doctrine.
To prevent a malicious chain of events, he announced that the United States would intervene in disputes in which it appeared that Europeans might occupy Latin American territory. He mediated a debt dispute involving Santo Domingo—and set a precedent for the United States to play a police role under the auspices of the Monroe Doctrine.
Like Roosevelt, Indian leaders could adopt a self-restrained policy designed to prevent geopolitical gains by outsiders in the Indian Ocean, preserving India’s autonomy and maintaining the freedom of maritime societies to use the sea for commercial, diplomatic, and military purposes. New Delhi can make India the policeman of the Indian Ocean.
And indeed, protecting shipping from attack – as the Indian Navy does – is typical police work.
So you have three potential futures for Indian diplomacy extrapolated from early US history: the freewheeler, the strongman, and the policeman. Which will it be? Or will India deviate from the American model and chart some course of its own?
Translation: SM
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