Go Indian Navy!

True to its tradition of nonalignment, India has declined to join the U.S.-led effort to keep open shipping lanes in the Red Sea, where Houthi rebels have pummeled merchant traffic indiscriminately with drones and antiship missiles. At the same time, though, New Delhi has dispatched ships of war to the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden to protect Indian-flagged merchantmen while succoring ships of any flag that suffer damage from Houthi strikes. Ten Indian Navy warships now patrol waters to the subcontinent’s west.

This is as it should be. Freedom of the sea is a common trust of all seafaring nations. All trading nations should safeguard it lest the briny main degenerate into anarchy, with all the mercantile and thus economic havoc nautical lawlessness would wreak. It’s fitting for India to act as a steward of maritime security in the Indian Ocean, where it regards itself, not implausibly, as a beneficent hegemon.

There are many strands to India’s image of itself, but an important one derives not from this civilization-state’s venerable history but from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. diplomatic history. In 1961 founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru went before parliament to make the case for expelling Portugal from its coastal enclave of Goa, a remnant of the Portuguese Empire ensconced on the subcontinent since the sixteenth century. Nehru appealed not to India’s grand past or to some Indian thinker of renown like the ancient philosopher Kautilya.

He grounded his appeal in the Monroe Doctrine (1823).

And he took President James Monroe’s logic to lengths that would have baffled Monroe, fashioning an Indian Monroe Doctrine to govern New Delhi’s conduct of diplomacy and military affairs following independence from the British Empire. Monroe merely forbade European empires to wrest back American colonies lost during a spate of revolutions. Contrary to the popular view, he did not vow to drive Europeans from the Western Hemisphere altogether. This was not a crusading doctrine. He just wanted to freeze a status quo convivial to the United States as well as newly independent Latin American republics.

Hands off, Europe.

Nehru went much further than........

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