.jpg)
By Ankit Panda
Ashley Tellis claims the United States should help India develop its next-generation carriers. He’s right.
Yesterday, my colleague Franz-Stefan Gady covered the main takeaways from a new Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, authored by Ashley Tellis, that calls for, among other things, broader cooperation between the United States and India on developing the latter’s naval capabilities. Specifically, Tellis focuses on carrier aviation and recommends that the United States ensure that India fields a more robust carrier capability than China. India has a Vikrant-class carrier in the works: the 65,000 ton nuclear-powered INS Vishal will launch in the next decade. Tellis’ report has drawn attention for good reason, and I’d like to herein address two points that stood out to me.
First, Tellis astutely notes that while the United States and India are strategically converging—certainly in the first 11 months of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s time in power—what both sides really need is a bilateral strategic event on the scale of the 2005 123 agreement on civil nuclear cooperation. That agreement stands as a watershed moment in bilateral relations between the world’s oldest democracy and its largest. It came a few years after that United States had alienated and sanctioned India for its nuclear tests in the late-1990s. The civil nuclear agreement was a feather in the Bush administration’s cap on foreign policy and showed the India and the United States could work together for mutual benefit.
Read the full story at The Diplomat