Indo-Pacific Geopolitics and US-India relations | Talk | Ashley J. Tellis

well good evening to all of you let me thank the volume for that very warm overly generous introduction to me a very special thanks turn hello who we were students together as he pointed out many many years ago of the college and it's a wonderful experience for me to come back here because these for my familiars I tell people often that the sensations in Don Bosco taught me how to read and the Jesuits since Avis college taught me how to think and I must tell you I spent more hours in the library and the canteen than the classrooms this is not I don't want you to follow my example but I found the library and the canteen to be so stimulating in terms of allowing us to think about the world that we were entering and the education that I got here of course was second to none I'm going to speak today about a topic that appears in the headlines but often does not convey us the complexity that it embodies and so what I wanted to do is give you a tutorial that will focus on two things simultaneously I want to talk about geopolitics and how to think of the world through the lens of love and then I want to use that as a foundation to tell you how at least the United States thinks about its relationship with India this is not the kind of stuff that policymakers generally Express because it's too abstract but it's important to understand it because it's really the foundation on which a lot of the colloquial language of policy expresses itself so I'm gonna first spend a few minutes giving you literally a classroom tutorial on classical geopolitics and I'm going to start with that map out there which if you look at that is sort of strange in terms of how it appears they are all used to the projection of the world called the Mercator projection which is the projection that you see very often and maps that are displayed and what the look at the projection which sort of does is that it takes around earth and puts it on a flat plane and with the result it in some distorting both Geographic relationships the sizes of countries and their structural connections and so what I've done here has actually moved away from the Mercator projection to something called the monavie projection and have distorted protection what the monument projection does is it's an equal area projection so this is an accurate rendition of relative sizes of countries there is no distortion that was besides so you would see Greenland actually quite small compared to a bucket of math when Greenland sort of dominates the northern hemisphere but it distorts the spatial relationships in a way that is very useful and I've done it for a particular purpose now there was a geographer in the early 20th century called Sir Halford mackinder who wrote an essay that was actually quite revolutionary because what he wanted to do was to help people think not of flat maps but a what he called around earth and this captures the image of their own earth and what health food McGillis said was that he said you've got to think of the earth as having two gigantic terrestrial bodies and around which all over the solar resorbs and the two bodies the first this body of land which if you actually look at it in this way looks like a unified whole it looks like a compact landmass and he called this body of land in the world Island and if you look at it it does have the appearance of an island sort of floating in in in an ocean space and what lies outside the world island these islands which is the northern South America and of course Australia and other islands so on the periphery he called these the outlying islands these were the outlying islands and this was the world Island and he was writing at a time when modern politics was in considerable so the first essay was written in 1904 1905 and he was trying to help people understand a very simple proposition and that simple proposition was this he was basically saying when you looked at the world Island this is really where the action in global politics is and at that time the action of course was concentrated in this part of the world island because Europe was the center of the universe there was a struggle that was taking place between the a rising Germany and Great Britain it would be it would take the form of two world wars eventually bringing the United States which was in the outer islands into the world island and so on and so forth so what he was finding you can communicate to his readers was that if you want to understand the future global politics you've got our dispensary Geographic relationships and focus on the world line because that's extremely important now he introduced two other concepts so you have the world act which was the first concept that you want to keep in mind and then he introduced or the concepts second concept was the concept of the heartland and he called this part of the world either roughly the path that today is dominated by Russia he call that the heartland and at that time this was long before global warming became a reality his simple point about the hot land was this it's part of the world which cannot be accessed through SEPA because it was huge in terms of land and the most powerful fleets could only sort of trouble it on the periphery but they could not trouble the core power that in this part of the world on the heartland and remember this was a period of time when all these were frozen wastes where sea power could not actually operated the Arctic and threatening the hot lands of the north so he said pay attention to the heartland and in and in McKinley's view the hotline was critical because his argument speaking now to the British government of the day and the British Empire of the time was that if you do not find ways of defending yourself and against the heartland the power of the hotline will be used to dominate all of Western Europe and if Western Europe falls to the forces of the heartland whoever occupies the heartland will be able to amass so much international power that that international power could in turn be used to then threaten the outlying islands that was the essence of his thesis and so he developed three categories to tell the story the world island and the outlying islands that's category one the heartland which is category 2 and the third Geographic factor that we flag was these areas which were on the periphery which he called the rim land and in McKenna's world view the replant was somewhat pitiful the story was the heartland the capture of the heartland by whoever occupied this part of the universe and the use of the hot lands power to them threatening the peripheries that is the story a few decades after the Kilda he was second great geopolitical there's actually a Dutch American called Nicholas - Nicholas pikemen was writing at the time in the second world war zone but kinder not a very unified Nicholas spike Minh was writing from 1942 to 1945 and spy quit was American and Spike meant salami tweak'd McKinley's thesis so he accepted the broad characterization of the world island the heartland and the rebel and the outlying islands and so forth but spike Minh changes the structuring of Mukunda almost turns it on his head and what spike man says is that yes you have to pay attention to the heartland because that is an enormous concentration of natural resources and if those natural resources come under the control of a single power it can threaten other parts to go all true but the key is not so much the hotline when he is going to be the reverse because if you get sufficient countervailing power in the Riverlands the gremlins can actually box the hotland in and prevent the hotline from using the power that accumulates to bring to bear against both in spirit as well as the outlying islands now remember spike Minh is writing for an American audience and he is writing for American audience at the time of the second world war with a very specific intention he wants to give us policymakers that they cannot be indifferent to the politics of the world Island he's writing at the time that the United States was come out of isolationism but he wanted to sort of drive the point home by saying that you can't come out of isolationism simply because there is a common thread you have to come out of isolationism permanently because of the you don't what's going to happen in this part of the world is going to have terrific consequences for your own security here and so what spike is essentially telling US policymakers is that you have to be involved in the fights and in the affairs of the other you have to be involved in the struggles that are occurring on the periphery because it is in American nation interests to make certain that there is a permanent balance of power that is maintained in this modern world now that teaching which comes from slightly becomes really the foundation for u.s. geopolitical thinking ever since and so when you think of u.s. foreign policy and if you think of us a grand strategy the first principle of u.s. grand strategy has been to make sure that there is a balance of power in the Eurasian landmass in order to prevent a Germany from rising in this modern world that could mobilize the resources that are found in this part of the world and then use those resources to threaten the outlying islands whether those be Japan Australia or the Americas in other words what's pikemen bid in a contribution that informs American strategic thinking to this day was that he put the debate about isolationism versus engagement not just as a political fashion it was not just a political debate which was occurring because of the fashions of the name but he was trying to tell them that that debate is actually anchored in permanent Geographic realities which are not going away and the essence of his message was the United States does not have the luxury of being indifferent to what happens in this part world we have in use the power that we have as an outline Island to find allies here and work with allies here to make sure that if ever a hot wind power arises that hartwin power you know well it's neighbors in ways that will allow it to then a mass power and threaten the world outside of continental Asia that's the foundation now for that reason the United States since 1900 went to war three times in Asia so in the first war the first world war what the United States did was the Bizet ramela and powerful Germany which was essentially threatening the rest of the countries in this part of the new man and threatening the hotline and so the United States with allies like Great Britain like France goes to war to prevent this rambling power from essentially taking over this entire European premonitory and eventually Russia in the Second World War it's a repeat of the same story and the objective is use peripheral countries that exist on the periphery of the third thing state and then box that threatening state from a commitment to B so that's in the first phase I think the World War one and World War two is really one phase of geopolitical competition because there are really two parts of the same crisis right it's managing the rise of German power whether it's the land mine Germany or Hitler's job and it's really the same thing but the tenure of course entity then you get the second phase and the second phase is dealing with the Soviet you may live in the corner and now the tables are sort of reversed but isn't the first phase the threat arose from the rippln to the heartland which is Germany threatening West and East in the second phase it's the Soviet Union the Heartland now threatening the peripheries and what the United States does is pretty much the same thing which is partners with peripheral powers in Europe and in Asia boxes the Soviet Union in in a seven-year Cold War and make certain that the Soviet Union cannot dominate all of Asia cannot dominate Europe and thereby preserves that balance of power that protects the United States we are now in the third phase and the third phase is interesting because once again the model is reversed you had the rise in China and the rise of China which is a remnant hour because its own lives on the peripheries of Asia a remnant power that is now rising that once again holds the potential its potential of becoming big enough to dominate all of Asia dominate all of Europe cated succeeds and then unifying this entire space to potentially then threaten the United States in the upper end so when you think of us-china competition which is very much of the headlines now you know there are fights in economics there are fights over trade there are fights over strategy and so on and so forth I want you to think not about just the headlines but the headlines are sort of interesting but the deep structural factors that are shaping this competition and the deep structural factor that shape in this competition is once again the Americans fear that a rising China will begin to mobilize its resources begin to build up a network of allies all around the Asian periphery and eventually use that power to threaten American interests in Asia and ultimately around the world that's the essence of the human but China's fascinated in a way that the Soviet Union never was and there are two reasons for why it is fascinating and extremely complicated from the point of view of their instance so let me tell you the fascinating part first the fascinating part is that China hasn't reached today so when you think of the Soviet leader right the reach of the Soviet Union was primarily towards Europe and primarily towards to a certain degree in Japan but Soviet power for all nerds for all its fearsomeness really was not global power because the funny thing about the Soviet Union even though it was military very powerful was then it was actually economically very weak in fact that the height of Soviet power in 1975 the Soviet Union never exceeded forty-five percent of America's yearly which meant that even though the Soviet Union looked so formidable in military terms it what it was so they a humanoid with a very large head but a very short body and it's economic foundations were relatively very weak so when you were talking with competition between the United States and the Soviet Union that competition looking at the denied side could go in only one direction it could go only in the direction of Soviet defeat because you could not compete with the United States which is actually twice in science China is an entirely different story for the first time we are looking at China today at about 60% of 70% of the size of the US economy depending on where China goes it could reach parity with the US economy if not exceeded itself so if there is a future us-china competition that is significant it will be significant with us for the first time it will be a rivalry between two relatively equal sized powers and we have not really seen a bite on the conversation between two relatively the only science powers for a long time in the modern people so that's one fascinating element about China the second fascinating element of time if China begins to dominate the Eurasian landmass as many Americans fear it will not be an engagement that will be restricted to Europe or to the Middle East or to Southeast Asia in a way that the Soviets it will be an engagement that actually covers the entire world island and China for example has now developed the Benton road initiative which is a effort to recreate the old marathon star cell problems both in its maritime dimensions as well as in its continental dimensions and what the marathon is is a Chinese effort to invest in infrastructure that would once again link China all the way across Central Asia to Europe as the old traditional trade routes once upon a time unfolded and in the same way there's a marathon unknown where China wants to build a network of valentine connections that were connected to the in subcontinent by sea connected to Southeast Asia by sea and then eventually Dutch the Pacific are with me African continent as well so the spatial reach of Chinese engagement will be far more dramatic than the spatial reach of the Soviet Union in a previous era so many things of Chinese engagement in these terms they are looking at the possibility of a Chinese sphere of influence that will not involve simply continental Asia but that will involve all of the peripheries of continental Asia and ultimately as a person so the Kindles worst nightmare that you could have a single resident in Eurasia they come in powerful enough to influence and shape the politics and they in this part of the world and then a master power to challenge the United States and security or the far afield America there is a real risk that beginners worst nightmare comes true and so when the US thinks about geopolitics it is this framing of the problem that shapes the calculations of medical decision makers now I want to talk about the rise of China for a few minutes to give you a feel for why that has become such an interesting challenge China historically was on this a great country but it was a country that always looked within itself it was not a country that went out into the world as said great European colonial powers and there was a reason for that the reason China was inward-looking was because the Chinese had to perpetually deal with three sets of problems the first set of problems were a very very porous border to the north now if you look at the great wall which the Chinese millet over centuries the reason they built the Great Wall somewhere along this along this part was precisely because they wanted to keep the barbarians from the steppes from coming southwards into China so there was always a landward threat that China had to be and as long as there was a land will thread the thread from the steppes China could not afford to think of engagements outside its own periphery the second challenge but the Chinese always have to worry about was succession challenges within the state because every time there was a new dynasty the new dynasty had to deal with the remnants of the old dynasty they had to fend off challengers for power and so on and so forth right so you have this whole business of succession crises at the time of diocese and it took a lot of energy and the third when the threats of internal disorder China has always had perennial problems of internal disorder and if you look at the things that body in the Chinese today more than anything else it's a thredson internal disorder with them in fact it's fascinating you know people talk about the Chinese defense budget as having grown dramatically in the last say 30 days the Chinese defense budget is somewhere about 60 percent of the US defense budget today and everyone looks at the growth of that defense budget over the last 15 years and you begin to get nervous because the chart here on the arrows sort of bonus of the branch but if you look that the Chinese budget for internal security the Chinese internal security budget is far greater than the budget for external events so even though the external defense budget has been throwing the bigger budget which doesn't get attention especially in the West is the and that tells you something about the religious fears of domestic disorder now so when we think about these three challenges domestic disorder succession crisis and threats from the north for the first time after many many years we find that the Chinese leadership is in a position where it can mitigate each one of these three crises so today both by various forms of economic cooperation as well as there is lots of surveillance the Chinese state has managed to heal threats of domestic disorder under control and it has done it in in in quite amazing ways to the exploitation of Technology right so we are likely to see for the first time a highly sophisticated lemonis surveillance state that the news artificial intelligence that they use all the things that you know all of us use like cell phones and so on and so forth in a grid that will allow the Chinese state the monitor the behavior of its own citizens so the first threat of domestic disorder that treadeth has been so that the yeast can take the second threat is the threat of succession crisis and today what she'd open has managed to do he has managed to limit the threats posed by succession crisis in fact we now say to do thing the rise of the new Chinese leader with the stature that matches Mao Zedong and the chopping someone who really has concentrated an extraordinary amount of power in itself who has actually managed to enshrine what is called Xi Jinping thought in the Chinese political Canon and who believes that is truly one of the great men in Chinese history who will help China rejuvenate itself as animation and the third part which is very interesting from a foreign policy quite a bit is that China today does not have any threats from the north throughout the Cold War one of the things that kept Chinese leaders of nights wasn't threats posed by the Soviet today Chinese Russian relations are so incredibly good that China today can afford to look that confidence outside without having to fear about threats from the way so the three historic factors that box China in and kept it in but looking those three historic factors had disappear and there is of course a fourth reality which is a reality made by American power after 1945 and that is globalization globalization was produced as a result of liberal American thinking 19:49 before the United States decided to leave after one the Second World War to create this new experiment and this new experiment was called a liberal training regime and it started out first with the International Trade Organization that evolved in to get the general agreement on tariffs and trade and that he wanted to the WTO the World Trade Organization and what was the essence of this project the essence of this project was the United States would build a global trading system when everyone traded with one another and the theory was if everyone traded with one another it would increase prosperity and it could increase prosperity it would inevitably lead to the spread of democracy and the promotional beats this is quintessential liberal beliefs about international politics and so the United States after in won the Cold War actually made an incredible decision which it did not make during the Cold War and homicide during the Cold War period America was steadily expanding the global trading system but it was expanding the global trading system only for its friends so if you look at the trading system as it evolved post qualified it was essentially a Western instantly and it begins with America's allies in Europe that American allies in Asia towards the end of the Cold War it expands to bring countries in Southeast Asia who were not for will American allies and if the United States was a Machiavellian power it would have stopped right there it would have said we've got all the countries that we want to strengthen and enrich who are within our sphere of influence there are all our trading partners let's stop right here right but even the 1990s after the end of the Cold War American liberalism American optimism and American hubris remember we had just won the Cold War and we stood there alone and we stood there completely confident that there was no power out there on the horizon khoka never challenges and in that moment we made the remarkable decision to bring China which until that point was not in the global trading system into the burger creditors and so they give China permanent trading status China joins a WTO and China becomes a trailing country American Capital begins moving to China European capital Japanese slap they get sworn in China and before you know it China becomes in manufacturing and the consequences of that transformation of consequences that all of us fear so it was a dramatic change in China you know 300 million people taken out of poverty within a generation 40 years of double-digit growth historically unparalleled in our development experience no one has grown as fast as China has in the last 40 right all this because China becomes part of a global trading system and the Chinese state uses its investments in its human capital to build up a manufacturing base that replaces the United States as the manufacturer to the world so when you think of manufacturing on the 3 phases there was once Great Britain was the workshop world as the 19th century went into the 20th century the United States was the workshop from the 20th century into the 21st century that transition is now taking place in the child and so China has now become a serious economic partner and a serious economic challenge right so that's the story of the world as we see it now and as we look out into the horizon we see that Chinese manufacturing Chinese entrepreneurism and Chinese the vision that China has of itself they'll inevitably take it outside the Asia than it was locked in for 500 years this is inevitable and in is natural but the fact that it is inevitable and natural does not mean that everyone sleeps well at night because when you think of a rising China with incredible power with incredible influence you begin to imagine dangers to your spirit and this is the evolution that the United States has come to now whether this sharing Chinese success we have benefited as a result in China success but they also are beginning to recognize that there is a shovel that accompanies Chinese success and that shadow is more and more resources being used to build instruments of war rather than simply focusing on the battlefield and this is the fundamental difference between the post 1945 to 1991 world and the post 1991 now in 1945 to 1991 world the company countries that grew as a result of living in the u.s. training system best in europe and japan right those are great examples war-torn countries came back into the global system as manufacturing power houses for a while there the United States was a little nervous and if you remember in the 1980s there were many in the United States who were worried that Japan would now become a new great power competitor and so on and so forth but those concerns sort of diminished because when you look to Japan they were manufacturing better automobiles better television sets that are electronics but they did not use their accumulated economic surplus to build machines of war the chalice United States the same astute investor yard they grew they developed but they did use the economics of the stupid machines one agency with China that's not true China's growing China is developing but China is allocating a substantial amount of resources to build the instruments award that one day at the challenging instance and how do we know this we know this because we have objective disagreements with China all around Asia they have objected disagreements over time and they have objected disagreements about Japan they have objected disagreements about the South China Sea and we are now slowly coming to the point where we are beginning to have disagreements with China about the Indian Ocean and in some ways if you're sitting in Beijing what China is doing is completely mad because if you're Chinese and you I have 40 years of an economic tale money behind it you've got double-digit growth why should you be doing this so what the Chinese are doing is not necessarily unnatural it just happens to be a natural thing that undermines American interests so one needs to avoid being modeled asleep when one thinks about this job right this is a great power it has now look at its capabilities and it wants its place except that there is already another star out there you know with the huge mass and which is potentially threatened by the rise of this new child so what does all this have to do with us in their relations actually everyone because when we look at the world in the way that I described right and you begin to ask yourself as a strategist what can I do to make certain that Chinese power does not begin to undermine my golden interests right I'm sitting at Washington melon I have a bat that looks similar to this and I have to stop thinking about I want a good relationship with China because I trade with them I have deep economic ties with them but I can't sleep easily because this China is not legible this China is not in Germany it's not an ally in the residence so I have to think in terms of that own logic that Mukunda and spiteful constantly reminded me about which is the only way you protect power that grows out of the world life from threatening you in the outer spaces is to make certain that there is a balance of power within the world I'm in the job that's the launch it's the only peaceful way we know to preserve an equilibrium in Asia that does not end up holidays now luckily for us there is another country that thinks the same way that's a complete understanding here there are others who also think this way but they have liabilities right so the Japanese think this way but the problem in Japan is that it's an island nation and one of the things we know is that water has a peculiar property it stops the easy projection of land different matter that's why when you have land borders and people who threaten you you get a lot more nervous if there are water spaces that threaten you and there are water spaces that dividing that countries that threatening you will be a lot more relaxed and so even though Japan thinks about the importance of balancing Chinese power it's too small and it's got water between they are the ideal country to keep the Chinese occupied distracted and a little nervous would be miss country to the world this people somehow poisoned the water Arsenal and get the Russians to stop thinking of the Chinese as the Netherlands the Unites States would be home because then it will be going back to the old world where Russian and Chinese anxieties suffice to balance each other a problem we have is that the Russians are actually at this point in a very very strong steel mood Besame defenseless because Russian policy today to Athena in States is conducted to the prism of 1991 and the collapse of is illegitimate you can understand Russia's animus right because they ran the school world with the Russians for seven years we defeated them because the collapse of the former Soviet we destroyed the old Soviet power we expanded NATO in the process that made the Russians extremely nervous and so it's not surprising to me that whoever once power in Moscow today there's not exactly look at the United States as a benign entity with whom they want to be best friends and someone like Putin who has real both anxieties and animus towards Washington finds that the policy that he wants is to find a way to reconstruct Russian hegemony a nation and so to construct Russian Atiamuri nature requires him to find friends who can make that possible and there's only one great friend that and that's why it is and so the one country that ideally the United States would have loved to be the way from China which is Russia is the one country that we cannot engage with in a way that big boy so you bought up the map and you start looking more closely right you look at Europe and you see Europe which is still a very powerful concentration of capabilities but deeply internally divided and certainly a Europe that is today also deeply intertwined with China in terms of economics on trade so this is not a guarantee that is going to go rushing to the fences to fight America's fights vagina you're gonna have to manage how we manage the European Chinese relationship but the expectation that you can rely all too easily on your to essentially balance the Chinese I think that is an English so you go around people in the Middle East and you can forget the Middle East in a microsecond because they simply don't have the capabilities to think about you which brings us to this country I don't want you to get the impression that I am sitting in a basement at Washington and moving chess pieces on a home and saying good news for the United States is that India has its own issues which I and India too is a country that's right I always have to remind people that when you think of the rise of Asia yes there was Japan yes there was a South Korea yes in later years there was a Singapore but don't forget now we also have many and luckily for us luckily for us India has its own anxieties about you these were not anxieties that we created don't believe me if you didn't have those anxieties I will be in the business of creating them but we don't have to work that out because India has its own challenges with each other and then Indian look some of the universe in there sees a China that has become extremely powerful I would have shown you our graphs at one stage in a classroom if you look at the science of the Indian economy and the Chinese economy just as recently as 1980 the two economies almost touch each other if you project the graph from 1980 to 2000 the Chinese economy is five times bloody miracle so from our point of view China gives in their heartburn for reasons of simple disparities in strength and then China has made some choices over the last 30 audience with respect to partnering with Pakistan increasingly beginning to penetrate South Asian self relations of the power relations in sri lanka relations of accommodation that's all it male watches these with a some very honest because in there like on great parts wants to have peripheries that are completely sanitized remember the british raj the british raj actually had a concept of the ring fence and the rogers concept the ring fence is accented among the ring fence was over all around the units of government they would be nothing but subordinate states of other states because the only power that would be sovereign and that amount would be the larger now unfortunately after independence those buffer states and support that states and surrounded it they have all the common to them and they've all become a foreign states in their own right and so india now simply cannot count on having a sanitized frontier without having to work for it therefore indian foreign policy has to bottom is labeled and it's no surprise that you know Prime Minister Modi like you remember Prime Minister Kajal you know good 20 years of you focusing more at work on the neighborhood because all great powers basically want to make sure that they have peripheries that are non threatening the United States sanitize the entire Western Hemisphere after the American Civil War the Monroe Doctrine was designed to make something that no remarked around in our neck of the woods India has a similar vision except that that vision is now subject to intrusion by Chinese power an Indian weakness is what makes the United States so I tell people we are condemned to be natural levels they condemned to be natural level is because inherent weakness requires countervailing American strength as a balancing power basically China and India's location and in this potential make severe absolutely irrelevant for the United States now in a purely mechanistic world if the world was nothing but Newtonian mechanics right what would be ideal from up what would be an ideal for our point will be something on the following you have an extremely powerful in there that begins to do what Russia did in a previous iteration visa major that is it is such a powerful concentration of capabilities that the Chinese have to start worrying about the challenges that you may have process to China and if the Chinese stop worrying long enough about the challenges that if they're poses to China then they don't have the race and the energy to put into naval forces that one day would operate on fear afraid of the earth operate under and not productive in fact this is the interesting thing about China's maritime expansion when you look at the history of Islamic structure over the last 3,000 or 4,000 years China has moved out to sea that has gone out and build you know navies and maritime forces only about three or four times and it's built navies just three or four times when those three conditions that I described the early object no succession crisis no problems of the north no domestic result and when China goes out with military forces it begins to become a power of international consulates and when there are crises that suddenly emerge back home China begins to be drawn from its international engagements and starts looking at work so today China is in that phase where it is looking outwards and building military capabilities that will be completely brokering if China is to change course something must find a happen in sign or something must once again happen on this country now for all the attention that the United States based power it's not exactly a Machiavellian state it does not have the intestinal fortitude to conduct its competition with China by stimulating internal trends right so if you were purely active le you would begin to say the Chinese are rising I need to bring them down a notch or two what do I need to do the first the most obvious thing is you create enough internal crisis in China and those internal crises will force the Chinese to look at its most obvious thing that anyone who eats the Prince but if they know that that's a highly risky proposition and it's not clear that it would succeed and so the United States is not gonna do so the some alternatives that one has to change China from the inside I'm going to be very very de now there are many Americans who still hope that if China becomes a democracy it begins to become more and more number these threats will disappear and maybe that's true and maybe that's true but no one has went from the formula for taking China from a body state really a Leninist party state and making it into a liberal democracy overnight and so the eternal solutions whether the terms things are peaceful other the deep thermal solutions are permanent those internal solutions appear to lie beyond our age and so the only solutions we have are external and it's in that external universe that Illya plays such an important role the vision of the United States has for stability in Asia is not an image I mean every year you will have a new document issued by the US administration those are nothing but exercises and product differentiation everyone wants to show that they've come up with a new great idea and they were packaged at the new inaudible all the ideas essentially variants on one old idea and the road is a balance of power within the world I mean that's what we need to address and so it's not surprising to me that after the 1991 period began to evolve the United States and India found themselves in a situation where they had all the conditions for a national power because it is struggling for ways to deal with challenge the United States is also struggling fermius to deal to the China challenge and therefore us-india relations dramatically so happy found sort of having found the magic solution in India I would have you not yet because for all the convergence that the United States and India have at the political level there is still a huge weakness in the bilateral relationship and that weakness is economic in fact we are in a very strange universe today where we have a deep and intensifying rivalry match right but we also have the deepest economic relations that we've ever had historically with China today so you have a rivalry with this great power that's rising and yet you are deeply connected to it in terms of your economic ties and your economic trade on the other hand you have a great relationship a great geopolitical relationship with this other great power that's rising which is in here when you look at us Indian trade and compare it to us China trade us-india trade is miniscule compared to u.s. Germany and so the fills that people like me have other than the geopolitics will take you only this far and not beyond the self impression because at the end of the day if we cannot convince ourselves that our prosperity depends as much on India as in the better China then when push comes to shove we will always find reason not to do what we would otherwise want to do and so what that tells me is that the task for both our countries in the years and the decades ahead his really to focus on the economic the strategy paths there are sort of hiccups ups and downs but those are self-correcting because nature as I described it today nature favors the power it is going to be born in the right direction without any see these crises no matter what the perturbations along but if they don't put the Foundation's run and the foundations are always economical because ultimately you don't have to be an access to real earnest and material interests really drive all of our interests and so to the degree that we don't pay attention to repairing the economic foundations of our relationship to that degree the us-india relationship will be less robust than actually contained on one fine point at the end of the day no one can protect American power an American privacy from the outside no matter how capable are countries the final obligation of protecting American privacy must be from itself that means the United States constantly has to look in a mirror and we have terrific advantages I mean I don't need to the new mothers we have a reasonably large population we have a demographic profile that is advantages second only to in years we are an extraordinary that they country we are still The Fountainhead of innovation in the global system we have the world's most powerful military we spend ten times more than the next seven countries combined so there are terrific advantages but the u.s. cannot be in the business of squandering its abandoned me unfortunately done a very good job of squandering our advantages in recent that they've gotta go back to looking at what is it that made the United States great and that means developing strengthening our domestic markets strengthening our human capital base being open to the best ideas the best people from the world know world I mean we are the world's greatest thieves of international human capital it's called an immigration system which allows the best and the brightest from the world to come to the United States make a success for themselves and actually make a success for us we've got an openness to ideas in the form of our liberal values if we lose these then we lose the real capacity to very smart so of course we will rely on of course we will rely on Japan but those are not substitutes for doing smart things for ourselves and that's going to be in many ways the biggest challenge that the University because these investments abroad we will continue to make them but the investments at home sometimes have not enjoyed success so I will end them that note and I'm happy to take questions and whatever time thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: ORF

Views: 4,314

Rating: 4.8991594 out of 5

Keywords: Indo-Pacific, Geopolitics, US-India, Ashley J. Tellis, Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs, senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment, International Peace, National Security Council staff, special assistant, George W. Bush, University of Chicago, political science, University of Bombay, St. Xavier's College, talk, orf

Id: _mfgndk-CJM

Length: 60min 13sec (3613 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019