Will India Soon Have a “Modi Doctrine”?

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India has long sought to apply the Monroe Doctrine to the Indian Ocean. Today, it has the naval strength to back up its claims.

America has the Monroe Doctrine, now repurposed as the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” or more colloquially the “Donroe Doctrine.” India may soon have the “Modi Doctrine,” named for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. An article from American Enterprise Institute analyst Michael Rubin has been rousing elite and popular enthusiasm on the subcontinent. Rubin proclaims that “it is time for a Modi Doctrine akin to the US Monroe Doctrine.” In other words, it’s time for New Delhi to enunciate a foreign-policy doctrine aimed at benign regional supremacy.

Rubin sees a variety of purposes impelling a Modi Doctrine. He wants to shield India’s South Asian neighbors from such Chinese predations as debt-trap diplomacy, illegal fishing, finagling for access to naval bases, and on and on. New Delhi has not—yet—formally embraced his vision. But it could. Rubin’s recommendation is more than whimsy. In fact, a Modi Doctrine would conform to Indian diplomatic traditions of decades’ standing, dating all the way back to independent India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

India Isn’t Happy About Iran War Spillover

Events may be stoking Indians’ craving for a primacy doctrine around now. Segments of the Indian body politic are incensed at the US Navy for sinking the Iranian guided-missile frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean, deep within India’s nautical environs. Last Wednesday, the assailant, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, disgorged a Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo near Sri Lanka, sending the frigate to the bottom with heavy loss of life. India’s opposition Congress Party inveighed against Prime Minister Modi’s government for its “silence” about the Dena sinking.

Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi took to X to reprimand Modi. “The conflict has reached our backyard, with an Iranian warship sunk in the Indian Ocean. Yet the Prime Minister has said nothing.”

The proximal cause fueling such outbursts was straightforward. Dena had recently departed the Indian seaport of Visakhapatnam after taking part in an international fleet review and a multilateral naval exercise dubbed “MILAN 2026,” both hosted by the Indian Navy. Gazing through Indian eyes, the US Navy assault on a recent guest of the Indian Navy—in the subcontinent’s approaches, no less—ruptured standards of hospitality and fair play. It was an affront to India, as well as a military blow to Iran.

But a deeper-seated reflex also helps account for Indian misgivings. Like other dominant coastal states, India takes a proprietary attitude toward offshore waters. New Delhi is far less overbearing about its prerogatives in its near abroad than is China, which regards much of the China seas—the South China Sea in particular—as sovereign territory. Sovereignty connotes state ownership of geographic space. India has made no such extravagant claims to marine space in the Indian Ocean. Still, Indians see it as a national preserve, and India as a benevolent steward over it. After all, the Indian Ocean is the only ocean on the planet named for a civilization-state. And what outsiders do there is apt to arouse concern.

The Three Phases of the Monroe Doctrine

Certain modes of thinking typify regional hegemons, major powers that inhabit distinct regions and dwarf lesser neighbors. Such an outsized great power considers itself the guardian of its home region against extraregional intruders bearing ill will. Whatever label it may go by in a particular theater, the Monroe Doctrine stands proxy for one such mode of thinking. But it’s a fallacy to talk about “the” Monroe Doctrine. America’s foreign-policy doctrine underwent several distinct phases during the century or so it remained in force. As the United States developed into a continent-spanning industrial power and the strategic environment changed around it, US leaders revised the ways and means for putting the ends expressed in the Doctrine into effect.

The first phase, which I call the “Freerider” phase, extended from 1823 into the 1880s or so. In 1823, President James Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, forbade Europeans who had lost their Latin American colonies to revolution to reestablish either direct or proxy rule over them. Colonies they kept, they could keep; lost colonies were lost forever. Yet the Monroe Doctrine had no US military enforcement arm to speak of. The United States declined to field a large standing military for most of the century. Instead Washington depended on Great Britain and its Royal Navy, the world’s premier fighting force, to keep rival empires from returning to the Americas. That suited the British just fine, as it held control over Canada, while its various European rivals owned far smaller colonies or remained locked out of the hemisphere altogether. The former mother country—and enemy—was a silent partner in the Monroe Doctrine.

I call the second, mercifully brief phase in the Monroe Doctrine the “Strongman” phase. It spanned the 1890s, after Congress had funded construction of the first US Navy battle fleet of consequence. As this modern ironclad armada took shape, Washington had less and less reason to freeride on the Royal Navy. In any event, the Royal Navy was starting to look homeward toward the North Sea, where imperial Germany had embarked on construction of a battleship fleet of its own. The United States took up the slack in the Western Hemisphere as Britain drew down its regional naval presence to compete with Germany.

In 1895, war loomed between Britain, then the colonial ruler of Guyana, and Venezuela. Natural riches had been discovered along the ill-defined border between the two countries, and both governments coveted those resources. British forces would have almost certainly won a war over the borderland—wresting territory from an American republic, and breaching the Monroe Doctrine. The administration of then-President Grover Cleveland demanded the right to mediate the dispute. No problem there. But Cleveland’s secretary of state, Richard Olney, went further, proclaiming that the United States was “practically sovereign” in the Americas. In other words, Washington was entitled to get its way.

Sovereignty means control. The sovereign presiding over some parcel of geographic space ordains; others obey. Half the world is a lot of geographic space to control. Olney’s audacious claim was understandably irksome for the states of Latin America. Hence the Strongman label for the 1890s.

The last phase was the “Constabulary” phase, associated with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 to 1909. TR fretted that European navies might ensconce themselves in the Caribbean Sea, athwart sea lanes approaching the Central American canal that the United States was then digging. Europeans had a ready excuse to seize ground. Latin American states wracked by revolution or governmental incompetence had a habit of defaulting on their debts to European banks. If they did, the bankers appealed to their governments for redress. If diplomats couldn’t negotiate an agreement for repayment, the government sent the navy to seize the customs house in the defaulting country. Europeans then diverted tariff revenue passing through the customs house from trade to repay the bankers.

From a Monroe Doctrine standpoint, the trouble with debt collection at gunpoint was that a European armed force now held American territory—territory where it might build a naval station to interfere with shipping in the Caribbean and Gulf. This would not do. To deprive Europeans of a pretext for land grabs, Roosevelt announced that the United States would resolve debt disputes itself. He declared an “international police power” whereby Washington would intervene preemptively, apportioning tariff revenue to the banks and the local government. The Constable sought—with considerable success—to satisfy both the defaulting country and aggrieved Europeans while safeguarding US interests. This was the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

Freerider, Strongman, Constable. US history hands us three measuring sticks for judging the ambitions and capability of coastal states professing something resembling—or explicitly modeled on—the Monroe Doctrine.

India Already Has a Strategic Doctrine

Toshi Yoshihara and I did just that back in 2008. We wrote an article for the journal Comparative Strategy arguing that India entertains its own version of Monroe Doctrine. Nor was this idle speculation. In 1961, Prime Minister Nehru went before parliament to justify booting Portugal out of its coastal enclave of Goa. Portugal had occupied this relic of empire since the time of Vasco da Gama. Nehru invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify unifying the subcontinent under Indian rule.

Strikingly, though, the prime minister applied a keener edge to the Monroe Doctrine than James Monroe and John Quincy Adams had in 1823. Where Monroe and Adams had framed their new precept as a defense of the Western Hemisphere against European imperial encroachment, Nehru announced that New Delhi would brook no external interference whatsoever with the Indian political system—and would resist such interference with its utmost might. That sounds like a Strongman in the making.

If so, Nehru was a seafaring Strongman. His version of the Doctrine appeared terrestrial in outlook and was avowedly India-centric, but the Monroe Doctrine is an intrinsically saltwater concept. As Theodore Roosevelt once observed, the Doctrine was as strong as the US Navy—and no stronger. The ruleset Nehru fashioned in 1961 thus applied, implicitly at least, to the Indian Ocean as well as dry earth. Yet the Indian Navy remained a minor actor throughout most of the Cold War. New Delhi tacitly relied on the US Navy to uphold maritime security in the Indian Ocean region. Only after the Cold War did Indians resolve to build a navy of serious heft—a navy capable of defending India’s Monroe Doctrine.

Toshi and I concluded that—much like the United States in the age of Monroe and Adams—India talked like a Strongman, but acted like a Freerider to the United States. And today? Judging from the Indian way of statecraft and the Indian Navy’s force structure, I would posit that New Delhi is taking up the mantle of a South Asian Constable. India may skip the Strongman phase, and I hope it does. Indians see themselves as the rightful hegemon of the Indian Ocean, but at the same time they are anxious for neighbors to see India as their benefactor. To imagine any Indian prime minister declaring “practical sovereignty” over the region strains credulity.

Whether India is in Freerider, Constable, or Strongman mode, sinking a frigate from a generally friendly state on the subcontinent’s doorstep is bound to rankle.

And New Delhi increasingly boasts the means to make good on a Modi Doctrine. The Indian Navy, the enforcement arm of any Modi Doctrine, continues to mature. It now ranks as the world’s fifth-largest navy, operating a multidomain fleet that includes aircraft carriers, major surface combatants, and conventional and nuclear submarines. By and large, moreover, the fleet’s strength remains concentrated in the Indian Ocean region. Massing combat power virtually guarantees the Indian Navy’s supremacy over the rival Pakistan Navy while giving it a puncher’s chance against extraregional interlopers like China. After all, if China enjoys “interior lines” against the United States in the Western Pacific, shifting forces around from a central position to blunt US advances along “exterior lines,” India enjoys the strategic advantage of interior lines vis-à-vis China, the exterior power, in India’s own backyard.

US diplomatic history, then, makes a rough guide to India’s future foreign policy and military strategy. And if New Delhi departs from the American pattern? Well, that’s valuable information as well.

A Modi Doctrine? Endorsed.

About the Author: James Holmes

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs, and the coauthor of Indian Naval Strategy in the 21st Century. The views voiced here are his alone.

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