The Debate | Opinion | South Asia

India Will Not Become Another China

In overlearning the lessons of China, Washington risks squandering the most important relationship it needs to counter China: India.

The ghost of China haunts every conversation about India. When U.S. Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau visited New Delhi earlier this year, he stated it directly: “We are not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago…” Now, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio heads to New Delhi for his first official visit since taking office, the China comparison will follow him into every meeting. Washington backed a rising Asian giant before, the argument goes, and got burned. Why should India be any different?

That fear may be intuitive for Americans, but it gets the lesson of China exactly backwards – and risks further benefiting Beijing. The lesson of China is not to distrust every rising power. It is to distinguish between those that seek to overturn the international order and those likely to strengthen it. And India, whatever its imperfections, has every reason to want the current system to endure.

With the advantage of hindsight, far greater skepticism was warranted the last time a large Asian civilization-state with a rapidly expanding economy sought Western support to accelerate its rise. Washington’s faith in globalization allowed Beijing to hollow out the American industrial base, sustained by the expectation that a wealthier China would naturally turn democratic and support global stability. Beijing’s revisionist ambitions were consistently overlooked in favor of market access: its aggressive actions across the Indo-Pacific, exploitation of the World Trade Organization, vast intellectual property theft and espionage, and regular bouts of wolf-warrior diplomacy all went unreckoned with so long as the commercial relationship held.

The failure of the China bet could not be clearer today. Not only did China fail to liberalize domestically or become a partner in strengthening the international order, but it developed into the most formidable economic and political adversary the United States has ever faced, all while eroding the West’s capacity to respond. The mismanagement of China’s rise has produced the defining geopolitical challenge of this generation.

A growing number of observers fear India will follow the same trajectory. Given China’s demonstrated strategic leverage from manufacturing strength, India’s ambitions to build a rival industrial base look conspicuous. The muscular rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with his party’s intentions to further centralize power through election reorganization and by exerting greater control over states raise eyebrows. New Delhi’s purported assassination of a Sikh separatist in Canada – and an attempted one in the U.S. – combined with its more aggressive nuclear brinksmanship with Pakistan strike many Western observers as concerning signs of what India’s ascent means for the fraying rules-based international order.

A Different Tradition

But there is a meaningful difference between becoming a more assertive power within the international system and seeking to overturn it. The primary threats to today’s world order bear unmistakable resemblance to their historical predecessors. Xi’s China, Khamenei’s Iran, and Putin’s Russia all reflect continuations of centuries-old ambitions for regional or global preeminence that predate the current international system. China’s self-conception as the “Middle Kingdom” at the center of the world, with a mandate to rule “all under heaven,” intimates its revisionist ambitions on the world stage today.

India’s tradition is different. With the minor exceptions of the Chola and Kushan empires, India’s history of political expansionism is remarkably limited. Its founding political parable reflects an ethos of restraint: the story of Emperor Ashoka Maurya centers on his horror at the violence required to build his empire and his subsequent embrace of nonviolent spirituality. The contrast with China’s founding emperor, Qin Shi Huang, whose legacy celebrates the ruthlessness required to expand and consolidate power, could hardly be sharper. There are of course many counterexamples in the voluminous histories of each civilization, but it would be very difficult, in aggregate, to argue that India’s tradition of statecraft prizes imperial dominance to anywhere near the extent that China’s does.

More recently, India’s independence movement further reinforced the same instinct. Following centuries of British imperial rule, India’s founding leaders championed self-determination and national sovereignty. Historically a victim of foreign conquest more so than a conqueror itself, India values the international order of nation states and continues to pursue a strategy that is deeply suspicious of........

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