THE CONTEXT: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders will meet later this year. The organization will discuss the recommendations from a group of experts(NATO 2020 Reflection Process) that advocates extending a formal offer of partnership to India. Such an idea has been discussed before but has always sunk on India’s aversion to involvement in rival geopolitical blocs. Earlier this year, at the Munich Security Conference, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said that the Western allies and close partners must forge stronger ties to counter the threat posed by China’s rise for transatlantic security. Stoltenberg underlined that in view of global challenges no country – and no continent – can go it alone.
WHAT IS NATO?
- Formed in 1949 with the signing of the Washington Treaty, NATO is a security alliance of 30 countries from North America and Europe.
- NATO’s fundamental goal is to safeguard the Allies’ freedom and security by political and military means.
- NATO remains the principal security instrument of the transatlantic community and expression of its common democratic values.
- Article 4 of the treaty ensures consultations among Allies on security matters of common interest, which have expanded from a narrowly defined Soviet threat to the critical mission in Afghanistan, as well as peacekeeping in Kosovo and new threats to security, such as cyber attacks, and global threats such as terrorism and piracy that affect the Alliance and its global network of partners.
- Article 5 of the Washington Treaty — that an attack against one Ally is an attack against all — is at the core of the Alliance, a promise of collective defense.
- It also conducts extensive training exercises and offers security support to partners around the globe, including the European Union in particular, but also the United Nations and the African Union.
PARTNERSHIP, NOT MEMBERSHIP
- NATO alliance has long discussed India’s membership, the latest being September 2011 invitation to be a partner in its ballistic missile defense (BMD) but India refrained from getting entangled in rival geopolitical blocs.
- At present, NATO is not offering membership to India; nor is Delhi interested. The motive is the question of exploring potential common ground.
- NATO’s “partner” concept is shorn of the Article 5 guarantee of collective defense against armed attack but provides defense dialogue, military-to-military planning, joint exercises, interoperability, and predictability.
- In the event of a conflict, India would benefit from having prior planning and arrangements in place for cooperating with NATO and its Mediterranean partners (including Israel, with which India has a close strategic relationship) to secure its western flank and the approaches to the Red Sea.
- To play any role in the Indo-Pacific, Europe and NATO need partners like India, Australia, and Japan. Delhi, in turn, knows that no single power can produce stability and security in the Indo-Pacific.
- NATO’s partnerships are highly customized arrangements. In India’s case, the sheer size and importance of the country may warrant a new and special category of partnership — one that combines periodic high-level dialogue, technological cooperation, and defense planning for maritime contingencies.
- An India-NATO dialogue would simply mean having regular contact with a military alliance, most of whose members are well-established partners of India.
THE GEOPOLITICAL CONVERGENCE
Since the end of the Cold War India and NATO have been on trajectories that will likely converge in the not-too-distant future. Scholars and strategists argue for India and NATO to come out of their respective shells and openly partner to deal with issues of common interest and concern.
China’s meteoric rise has dramatically heightened India’s need for closer security relationships with politically reliable, like-minded states. As China’s aggressive actions in the Galway Valley and other border areas demonstrate, Beijing is increasingly willing to depart from its peaceful rise strategy to directly challenge even the largest of its neighbours. This behavioral shift is likely to accelerate as China’s military capabilities expand. Already, China spends more on its military than all of its immediate neighbours combined, and nearly three times as much as India.
In these circumstances, India’s longstanding strategy of careful equidistance is not viable. Inevitably, New Delhi will have to undertake more deliberate efforts to counter-balance the Chinese power. It has already begun to deepen bilateral defense ties with Japan, the United States (US), and other regional players threatened by China, including through the Quad. Becoming a NATO partner would be a natural extension of this evolution.
NATO also wants to expand its influence in the Indo-Pacific and Asia-Pacific regions. As a result, NATO is likely to regard India’s unique geographical location and its position in the so-called democratic camp as important. NATO may shift its resources toward the Indo-Pacific region to adapt to the changing world landscape.
FEASIBILITY OF PARTNERSHIP
In the past, some NATO allies have effectively blocked discussion of the matter by insisting that any offer of partnership to India be accompanied by similar invitations to Pakistan. This may have seemed attractive to some in the era when NATO militaries were mainly focused on conducting operations in Afghanistan. But with the winding down of operations there, NATO has little in common with a Pakistan that is increasingly radicalized at home and aligned with China.
By contrast, the case for NATO partnership with India — a large maritime democracy with concerns and interests that tend to overlap with those of the US and many European allies — has only grown more compelling as China’s rise has accelerated.
During the Cold War, India’s refusal was premised on its non-alignment. That argument had little justification once the Cold War ended during 1989-91. Since then, NATO has built partnerships with many neutral and non-aligned states. NATO has regular consultations with both Russia and China, despite the gathering tensions with them in recent years. Also, Delhi does military exercises with two countries with which it has serious security problems — China and Pakistan — under the SCO. India has military exchanges with many members of NATO — including the US, Britain, and France — in bilateral and multilateral formats. So a collective engagement with NATO must not be problematic.
Thus, India is opening up to the idea of collaborating with NATO states to meet its enhanced national security needs, both in its neighborhood and in distant regions. NATO meanwhile, sees this as an opportunity to share international responsibilities with an emerging global power on a note of mutual trust and cooperation.
India is emerging as a global power to be reckoned with and the country has started asserting its influence at various international forums in order to augment its national interests. Unlike in the Cold War era, today India stands tightly integrated into the international economy and global political system.
Meanwhile, NATO as a security alliance is currently undergoing a transformational change from within. It is now involved in an array of capacity-building measures in order to refashion itself to suit the necessities of the day, while also preserving its fundamental identity and values. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, this collective security institution has been unable to define a common threat for all of its member states – especially an enemy state/states. However, it is now foreseeing the rise of China as a prospective threat for the sustenance of the established world order. So, in order to counterbalance the rising influence of Beijing, NATO is gearing up with essential changes to its strategic doctrine.
India and NATO both uphold a shared set of values, like democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, human rights, and international law. Moreover, at a strategic front India has extended its neighborhood framework beyond the Indian subcontinent over the past decade. This has brought it closer to NATO, which has forayed eastwards from the Mediterranean with its “out-of-area” operations during the same time.
Hence, the fundamental commonalities and emerging synergies are bringing the two parties together, both at the political and military levels.
QUAD and NATO
Amid increasing recognition of the Asia-Pacific Region as the engine and center of future global development and growth, the first high-level virtual summit of the Quad was held recently. The Quad’s recent resurgence has been driven by uneasiness about the rise of China and the security threat it poses to the international order. Yet there is no direct reference to China, or even military security, in Quad’s first-ever joint statement. On the contrary, the most significant outcomes of the summit are related to COVID-19 vaccine production, facilitating cooperation over emerging technologies, and mitigating climate change.
Not an Asian NATO
Commentators often cast it as an “alliance” in the making, perhaps an “Asian NATO.” It is not. Rather, the Quad is designed as a loose-knit network of like-minded partners aiming at a broader purpose.
The threat posed by China is at one level military, as evidenced by its proactive pursuit of territorial claims in South Asia, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea. At another, it is economic and technological. It is this broader aspect of the global order that the Quad aims to address, as is clear from two of the joint statement’s specifics, which focus on the establishment of working groups on vaccine development and critical technologies. Both these efforts seek to constrain China’s central position in the global system, but also to develop a world order that is broad-based and inclusive.
The third working group being set up is on climate change, an area in which China is a cooperative player and not a competitor, and thus downplays the notion that the Quad is simply an instrument of containment. Together, the three initiatives are designed to create an environment that encourages China to be a positive player and persuades other states to shed their hesitancy toward the Quad. With these arrangements, the Quad has the bandwidth to focus on countering the challenging non-security frontiers of Beijing’s influence.
Military Dimension:
Though the summit focused on non-military initiatives, the Quad by no means downplays the military dimension. Its members have established the basis for regular defense cooperation through naval exercises, and the sharing of intelligence and military logistics. Adding further heft to previous bilateral efforts, the trilateral India-U.S.-Japan Malabar naval exercises expanded to include Australia last year. The four states have consolidated their military responses by building a set of nested strategic partnerships: linking their bilateral relationships with the India-Japan-U.S., India-Australia-Japan, and U.S.-Japan-Australia trilateral. The Quad is a logical extension of this network and has the potential to build a “Quad Plus” arrangement involving Canada, France, and perhaps New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Unique Selling Point:
Therein lays the Quad’s unique selling point: offering value to all states and banking on the network effect that underpins an emerging world order. The Quad is not so much a tight alliance as a core group that seeks to enlist the support and cooperation of other states in both military and non-military actions. The notion of a “Quad Plus” captures this well without focusing on membership. The elasticity of this framework incentivizes other states who may want to link to and unlink themselves from specific Quad initiatives as and when useful.
China’s View:
China, on the other hand, views “Quad” as a threat to its dominance in the region and says that the forum is an attempt by the US to create an Asian version of the NATO directly aimed at counterbalancing its interests. In fact, the US deputy secretary of state recently suggested that the informal defense alignment between the four nations could be the beginning of a Nato-style alliance in Asia.
But India remained committed to rules-based world order and respect for territorial integrity as well as sovereignty. And advancing the security and economic interests of all countries having legitimate and vital interests in the Indo-Pacific remained a key priority. During the recent visit of the Russian Foreign Minister to Delhi, both sides agreed that military alliances in Asia were inadvisable and counterproductive.
The Quad can set the framework for a global governance model in a post-pandemic world, but it is unlikely to become a NATO-like formal security alliance. Its evolution will be determined by its ability to mix global challenges in the interests of a wider range of countries.
BENEFITS OF PARTNERSHIP
In the near term, India would derive strategic-signaling value from even the appearance of drawing closer to the Western Alliance at a crucial, early phase of Beijing’s transition to a more aggressive posture. The signal will hold all the more value precisely because it has till now it has bordered on geopolitical taboo.
Strengthening ties with NATO now, while China is still in the early phase of a shift to a more assertive posture toward both South Asia and Europe, could pay dividends in dissuading aggression and ensuring that, should China continue on its current trajectory, India has as many friends as possible in the right places.
Longer-term, India would derive military-strategic benefits from a partnership with the world’s most powerful alliance. NATO partnerships come with regular defense dialogues, military-to-military planning, and joint exercises that improve readiness, interoperability, and predictability. In the event of a conflict, India would benefit from having prior planning and arrangements in place for cooperating with NATO and its Mediterranean partners (including Israel, with which India has a close strategic relationship) to secure its western flank and the approaches to the Red Sea. Partnering with NATO also carries technological benefits. Under a provision in the US 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, India now enjoys the same technology-sharing and cost-sharing perks as other non-NATO US allies for purposes of the Arms Export Control Act. But adding NATO partner status could also position India to benefit from possible future programs aimed at lowering the barriers for cooperation in emerging technologies between NATO and its Asia-Pacific partners
Europe: A pragmatic engagement with NATO must be an important part of India’s new European orientation, especially amidst the continent’s search for a new role in the Indo-Pacific. India’s real problem is difficulty in thinking strategically about Europe. The bureaucratization of the engagement between Delhi and Brussels and the lack of high-level political interest prevented India from taking full advantage of a re-emerging Europe. Talking to NATO ought to be one important part of India’s European strategy.
CHALLENGES
- Non-alignment: Any suggestion that India should engage the NATO is usually presumed as a political taboo in foreign policy. India’s traditional stance of non-alignment is preventing it from translating the current uptick in the relationship with the US into any meaningful collaboration. The country’s political-military establishment has always held a skeptical attitude toward aligning with any military bloc or superpower under the notion of safeguarding national sovereignty.
- Indo-Russian ties: India and Russia share a special and privileged strategic partnership. India is trying to balance Russia and the US. If India is to be included in a security system like NATO, which was founded to deal with the Soviet Union, India-Russia relations would suffer a decline. There has already been a backlash in Moscow over New Delhi’s strategic alignment with Washington in recent years. Russia has reservations about New Delhi joining the Indo-Pacific initiative and Quad. Russia has tacitly nudged India to stay away from any move by the United States to turn the Quad into a NATO-like military alliance in order to contain China in the Indo-Pacific region.
- Pakistan-Russia ties: Russia can also take advantage of the opportunity to strengthen its cooperation with Pakistan in this light as a warning to India. If Russia intensifies its cooperation with Pakistan, India will face greater challenges in geopolitical security. Recently, after visiting Delhi, the Russian Foreign Minister visited Pakistan for the first time in nine years. This was a clear message of deepening ties. Russia has expressed readiness to strengthen Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts with the supply of “relevant equipment”, which will raise eyebrows in Delhi.
- AF-Pak: The U.S. government has not fully embraced India as a strategic partner over any of its existing partners in South Asia, including India’s arch-rival Pakistan, and elsewhere. The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) — a NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan — continued to freely engage with Pakistan in its War on Terror in Afghanistan despite India’s calling Pakistan a terrorist state.
- NATO’s Weaknesses: While NATO is an impressive military alliance, it is riven with divisions on how to share the military burden and strike the right balance between NATO and the EU’s quest for an independent military role. NATO members disagree on Russia, the Middle East, and China. Meanwhile, conflicts among NATO members — for example, Greece and Turkey — have sharpened. NATO’s recent adventures out of Europe — in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have not inspired awe.
WAY FORWARD
There is an imperative need on part of both parties to collaborate immediately. The big question remains how they can move in this direction. At this juncture, NATO needs to explain to New Delhi’s strategic community how it has changed since the Cold War and clearly convey its intentions to forge a “partnership of equals.”
Moreover, NATO needs to make Indian policymakers realize that it is a win-win situation for both parties to enter cooperation and collaboration. On the other hand, India needs to come out of its Cold War mindset and consider NATO a potential partner.
India is certainly considered an essential element of any strategy in the region. But so far, New Delhi has not dared either to directly align itself with the U.S. To contain China or add an outright anti-Chinese dimension to its participation in the Quad.
Meanwhile, the growing gap in national power, the long-term border confrontation, and other related factors might well push Indian strategists to a certain revision of the policy of strategic autonomy and make the U.S. the main security donor, as in the case of Australia and Japan.
If Delhi is eager to draw a reluctant Russia into discussions on the Indo-Pacific, it makes little sense in avoiding engagement with NATO, which is now debating a role in Asia’s waters. Russia has not made a secret of its reservations to the Quad and Delhi’s ties with Washington. Putting NATO into that mix is unlikely to make much difference.
Delhi, in turn, can’t be happy with the deepening ties between Moscow and Beijing. As mature states, India and Russia know they have to insulate their bilateral relationship from the larger structural trends buffeting the world today.
Meanwhile, both Russia and China have an intensive bilateral engagement with Europe. Delhi’s continued reluctance to engage a major European institution like NATO will be a stunning case of strategic self-denial.
China sees India as the principal impediment to the realization of its ambitions to dominate Asia and this is likely to lead to more violent confrontations. New Delhi should pursue a multifaceted strategy that includes cooperative elements, but there is ultimately little that India can do to mitigate the underlying sources of the rivalry. India has all the more reason to partner with the United States in a NATO-style arrangement.
CONCLUSION
Partnering with NATO would not significantly constrain India’s broader geostrategic options. Egypt and Israel are both NATO partners who maintain defense relationships with Russia. Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, and Austria are all NATO partners with long-standing neutralist traditions.
A sustained dialogue between India and NATO could facilitate productive exchanges in a range of areas, including terrorism, changing geopolitics; the evolving nature of military conflict, the role of emerging military technologies, and new military doctrines. More broadly, an institutionalized engagement with NATO should make it easier for Delhi to deal with the military establishments of its 30 member states. On a bilateral front, each of the members has much to offer in strengthening India’s national capabilities. NATO must extend a formal partnership offer to Delhi; India must shed its hesitation. Both have a common challenge.
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