Lots of wooing and bromancing later, does India really have a true friend in the White House? A friend who'll rush to help when a certain stand-off in a Himalayan pass escalates into war? “I am quite sure that the US will come to your support. This is not about no first use (of nuclear weapon),'' said Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Washington based The Stimson Centre, a policy research centre that focuses on working to solve global security threats.
Krepon was speaking at the India International Centre at an event organised by the Institute of Chinese Studies.
He called the Chinese road building in peripheral areas as the functional equivalent of creating atolls in the South China Sea. “It (the present situation in Doklam) is certainly not a one off situation, even when, and if it gets resolved. It raises the question of how India will protect its interests in peripheral areas,'' he said.
Krepon said the Indo-US ties, which took off after the signing of the civil nuclear deal, has withstood the change in government in the US. “It has withstood six months of Trump presidency, though the same cannot be said for NATO (and its ties with the US).''
He pointed out that India was among three countries that the Trump administration has reached out to in a big way, the other two being Israel and Saudi Arabia. While acknowledging that strong ties between the two nations was important “for a friendly state to protect its interests against an increasingly assertive neighbour'', he said that it would depend more in Delhi than Washington to plan out how this works out.
Krepon noted that Washington was no longer the region's crisis manager in-chief as that role had become considerably impaired in recent times.
Krepon also spoke on how the nuclear axis was wobbly, with so many developments across the globe— Iran, North Korea, and the India-China-Pakistan triangle, too. He wondered whether the US would accept a nuclear deterrent relationship with North Korea, given the government in power right now. “If there is military action against Pyongyang, just think what the nuclear order will be like.''
He said it did not matter how powerful the bomb that would be detonated, the mushroom cloud would still be above us. ``This (the present) nuclear order has to be maintained at any cost,'' he added.
