Donald Trump’s strategy may dampen Indo-US ties: Ashley Tellis

NEW DELHI: Mumbai-born Ashley Tellis, one of the key persons credited for the burgeoning Indo-US strategic partnership, has cautioned that President Donald Trump’s proposed ‘America First’ strategy could dampen the momentum in bilateral ties and strengthen China’s position in Asia.

“Although it is not inevitable, Donald Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States could interrupt the dramatic deepening in US-Indian ties to the disadvantage of both nations,” Tellis, senior fellow, South Asia Programme at the leading American think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in an article titled ‘Avoiding the Labours of Sisyphus: Strengthening USIndia Relations in a Trump Administration’, published in Asia Policy magazine of the National Bureau of Asian Research.

Tellis wrote further, “The United States in turn will have lost the opportunity to preserve an advantageous Asian balance of power, which by incorporating a strengthened India actually constrains Chinese ambitions and thereby buttresses US primacy for more time to come.”

The Washington-based National Bureau of Asian Research conducts advanced independent research on strategic, political, economic, globalisation, health and energy issues affecting US relations with Asia.

Trump’s proposed ‘America First’ strategy has given rise to speculation about the US looking inwards, leading to loss of momentum in ties with countries including India.

Tellis, 55, who played a key role in both Bush and Obama regimes in building Indo-US strategic and defence partnership, said that the variety of positions adopted by Trump suggests that the potential threat to the continuing transformation of USIndia relations comes less from his views on India, which are probably unsettled, than it does from his iconoclastic convictions about the relationship between the US and the world.

He argued that while many elements of Trump’s nationalist agenda are understandable, even defensible, the world view they represent diverge from that which initially cultured the evolving US-Indian partnership.

“Going back to the earliest years of the George W Bush administration, the US rapprochement with India was premised on the assumption that the principal strategic problem facing both countries consisted of the rise of China and the threat it posed to both US primacy and Indian security, not to mention the safety of the US’ other Asian partners and allies, simultaneously,” Tellis wrote.

If India fails to satisfy the anticipation of reciprocity embodied by an ‘America First’ policy, a likely prospect given India’s resource and power constraints, both nations will have ended up worse off, according to Tellis.