Ashley Tellis is speculated to be the next envoy to India.
Ashley Tellis, who is speculated to be the next envoy to India, warned that Donald Trump’s America First strategy has the potential to “damage” Indo-US ties, PTI reports.
“Trump’s America First strategy has the potential to damage the US-India relationship. Trump should instead strengthen India’s alliance to cope up with the challenges posed by China,” Tellis, senior fellow, South Asia Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a top American think-tank wrote in an op-ed published in Asia Policy by the National Bureau of Asian Research.
The 55-year-old Mumbai born Indian American expert said that the variety of positions expressed by Trump suggests that the potential threat to the continuing transformation of US-India 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 argues that while many elements of Trump’s nationalist agenda are understandable, even defensible, the world view it represents diverges 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 principle 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 partner and allies, simultaneously,” Tellis wrote in the op-ed.
“Since it was assumed that the United States would subsist as the principal protector of the liberal international order, and the Western alliance system in particular, even in circumstances where the containment of China was impossible because of the new realities of economic interdependence, the Bush administration slowly gravitated toward a strategy of balancing China by building up the power of key states located on its periphery,” he said.
Tellis reminds that 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.
“Without the benefits of a preferential affiliation with the US, India’s challenges with regard to managing a rising China (and even troublesome Pakistan) will have become considerably more difficult,” he said.