Biden Must Build on Trump's Partnership with India

The United States must ensure that the foreign policy bureaucracy’s pursuit of its own goals does not undermine national strategic aims. Senior leadership can help by enunciating clearly where U.S. strategic priorities lie. Pompeo, to this end, issued State Department-wide guidance emphasizing both the general importance of U.S.-India cooperation and the need to remove specific obstacles to technology transfer that would impede defense sales and other strategic coordination. Current senior leadership should do likewise. Reinforcing the message can help to avoid not just lost opportunities, but also prevent damage to the U.S.-India relationship resulting from misplaced priorities.
FIFTH, AVOID false equivalence between India and Pakistan. For decades, policymakers spoke of India and Pakistan in the same breath, treating the two countries as a single, hyphenated entity united by a common conflict. Although this practice has become less common in recent years, the United States has still often devised policy toward India or Pakistan with the opposing state in mind. As a result, the United States has limited its strategic cooperation with India, and enhanced its cooperation with Pakistan, hoping to prevent India from gaining a strategic advantage that would upset regional stability.